The guys at my go club are always telling me I need to keep my stones more connected and try to divide my opponents forces but I never find occasion to do this because I'm always more concerned with placing stones in a way that gets the most influence. I can't see the benefits when I'm playing of cutting apart opponents groups over gaining influence in ANY situation, for some reason my mind doesn't see the effects, I just think to myself the player with the most influence/territory wins so why waste possible influence cutting and connecting, but I know they're right about dividing and connecting groups over gaining influence in certain situations because they're better players and they wipe the floor with me. Is there any visual examples that you guys can think of where I can see the real gains of splitting apart opponent's groups over gaining influence?

Post a game or situation where this sort of situation has cropped up, and I'll try to offer a few suggestions

generally speaking, the games you lost should be good examples of why you should care about cuts.

It comes down to life and death, in a pinch. If your groups are separated they have to make life separately, which means losing territory to make eyes, and building a new border. Being cut or invaded makes little difference: what you consider your territory is not really yours if the opponent can come in.

This is the general guideline: as topazg said, having a real game to comment would make explanations simpler.

At this stage, you can pretty much forget everything about influence. Your biggest problems are likely in your basic shapes.
As topazg and iazzi have suggested, post a serious game here and let's take a look.

I'm wondering what you think of as influence.

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The simple answer is that if your groups are cut apart and weak, you'll be struggling throughout the game to make them stronger while your opponent attacks you. While your opponent is attacking you, he will find it quite easy to make territory and take away yours. You meanwhile will not be able to make a whole lot of territory because you'll be too busy trying to live with all the weak groups your opponent is attacking. Also, the more weak groups you have on the board, the more likely it is for some of them to die. Of course, if you have strong groups and your opponent is the one with the cut apart weak groups, it is suddenly you who is on the attack.

On a related note, you seem to talk about influence versus strong groups. I would say you can't have influence without strong groups. The point of gaining influence (as opposed to territory) is that if your opponent gets near to it, you will be able to attack them strongly for profit. But if your groups are weak, it's hard to effectively attack your opponent for profit, as your opponent will be attacking you at the same time. But if your groups are strong, you can attack your opponent at will.

I realize this answer seems rather high-level, and I think, like Ed Lee said, that at 20k your problems likely come from basic mistakes rather than an inability to grasp what I'm saying. Still, hopefully this answer is of at least some help to you.

As for good examples demonstrating the difference between staying connected and not staying connected, there is a very good one in the book "Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go," but I'll have to see if I can find any freely available ones.

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We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

Divide and conquer is not a go proverb, but it still applies.



How do you get influence without keeping your stones connected?



Well, their advice is well meaning, but they have obviously not gotten through. I think that you are right to listen to advice but to keep your own counsel. At the same time, let's be frank. You know next to nothing about go. Why not experiment? Try a few games where you just concentrate on connecting and cutting and see what happens.



Oh, sure. But in your next teaching games with players at your club, why not ask them to show you? If they think that you are making mistakes in that regard, there must be plenty of examples.

Or perhaps they have shown you, but not convinced you. In that case, keep your own counsel, but question yourself.

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Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Cool. I'll try to do that next time it happens.


To me it seemed like my main problem was preventing infiltration but after the games were done I could see that my defeat had something to do with not keeping my groups connected.


Influence is the only thing I have going for me. I can open pretty well and tanuki for influence pretty well.


Pretty much when a piece has a field of influence it can use to put pressure on future developments in the area.

I see what you're saying but in the games I've played it usually ends up that my territory gets taken away or invaded due to a chink in the individual groups armor rather than the group not being a bigger stronger group. My groups seem to die less from coming into contact with bigger groups than they do from well placed small invasions.


I don't get influence if my stones aren't connected, but I still get it when my groups aren't connected.

There's one guy there who I'm going to ask next time to show me, he's really good at explaining things. I'm definitely going to mess around with a couple games just doing dividing and connecting.

I would worry about influence much right now, because you probably don't have the knowledge or experience to use it properly. I mean no offense by saying that - I didn't have it when I was a beginner either, nor did Bill or Ed or Topaz or all the other posters around here.

Work on basic shapes, staying connected and disconnecting him, and life and death.

For a good place to start on shape, try http://senseis.xmp.net/?Shape

And welcome to the forums.

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thanks, it's cool to be here.

I've been playing seriously for months now (I started out a year ago but I didn't appreciate the subtleties of the game). I don't actually know what my level is but I've read and understand most of the information on basic shapes and not being inefficient or too vulnerable. I clicked a bunch of those links several links in awhile ago. I just don't have a natural mindset for knowing when to worry about connecting, capture is my weakness.

Here's an example of what I mean (It's a bit rough but I think it demonstrates the general issue)



Here black in the corner has a dilemma, he's clearly being separated from the main group but at the same time he has an opportunity at E8 to quarter off a large chunk of territory which might otherwise get invaded next turn by white. Does he spend his turn trying to connect with the main group which will get him no territory but will connect his own forces while dividing his opponent's forces or does he play E8 getting first dibs on a huge swath of territory letting himself get disconnected from the main group in the process?

Unfortunately the answer is neither. It's not important to connect the corner group with the 'main' group because it's not in danger of dying and it doesn't separate any of White's groups to attack. E8 is also not important because it is small in territorial value and gote. The green figure in your second diagram even says so (it hardly encloses 8 points), even though it isn't entirely accurate because White can slide under with a move like C7 and not have to worry about getting it separated so it's even less in value than what your green figure indicates.

The best move in this situation would probably be R17 because it'd give you the corner and make it difficult for White to invade your moyo on the right (he'd have to try and live on the side, which is in general harder to do than living in the corner). By similar reasoning, C17 is also a big move.

I think you're being too dogmatic about your definitions. You need to ask, what makes a 'main group' have this status? Is there some benefit to being the single largest group on the board?

The answer, as you probably know, is that the main group is almost certainly alive. It is very solid, with plenty of room to make eyes. By connecting our other groups to it, we make these groups also alive, which is often valuable.

Given this definition, we can say that the main group is important because it is safe. It is safe because it has plenty of room, and is probably alive. Connecting groups to it is valuable because although this is worth 0 real points, it is possibly worth many safety points.

Finally, we can use this to answer your question. Lets imagine a board with lots of smaller groups - your bottom left group being the largest of them. Would it then be the 'main group' for you? Would you want to connect your other groups to it? If yes, you've answered your own question - the bottom left group is already big enough to be considered safe, and in a different game you would want to connect other groups to it to make them safe. In this case, there's no point spending another 0 point move to connect it to another group, so you are better off, as you suggest, laying claim to more territory there.

If you answered no, you're wrong, but there's some more reasoning to fix that. You have two options; connect to the larger safer group (0 real points, some safety points), or make two eyes locally by claiming more space there (some real points, some safety points). In this case, the correct move is still to play to take more of the corner because this is worth safety points (it makes the group safer) and worth real points.



Finally finally, I'll note that neither of your suggested moves is particularly good (as submit tells me Araban has already said), but my post is aimed at showing you how to choose the right spirit of move, not the right point to put it on. In your example game, every group is quite strong, and the most interesting play is an invasion into one player's large area (which is too large for the invasion to be killed), or a move to prevent an invasion into one's own area. It is not a good time to worry about your groups safety, as they are both already alive.

You might find it interesting to flick through some pro games - there are plenty at eidogo.com . I don't mean that you should particularly study or memorise them, but you might find it interesting to see how the shapes flow, how groups are not always connected together, and how groups that probably look (to you) remarkably weak are treated as remarkably strong by the players. I think that, in moderation, this helps to give a feeling for how one's own games might flow.

What you are showing doesn't look like a real game, but I guess I can see what you are getting at. There isn't much value in connecting or cutting live groups, because moves there are likely to wind up being dame points (points of no value) at the end of the game. The value of cutting and connecting appears earlier on, when there is a possibility of creating / preventing real weaknesses. If your games really do look like this---both players dividing up the board in gote---then I agree it's hard to see the value. Maybe a game against a stronger player will show more worth discussing.

That makes sense. I wasn't sure if there was an added value to connecting groups that I wasn't aware of.


If I had thought of it I would have already put stones in those points to take the focus off of them. If invasion wasn't an option though I'd probably pick E8 or something like it.



I just quickly threw that together.

Well, it saves a couple of points under group tax

CXUD, I grabbed a recent amateur game from KGS and marked it up in ways that illustrate some basic ideas about why it's important to keep your groups connected, and your enemy's groups separated. Why don't you look at this and see if you can point out any plays where you think you wouldn't know whether or not to connect your groups? (Hopefully this will remove any confusion coming from the "unrealistic situation".)

To stronger players: if I'm spouting garbage, feel free, to edit the sgf and re-upload.

[sgf-full]http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/download/file.php?id=999[/sgf-full]

@jts:

One thing that's not quite right. You say the upper right corner can fend for itself at one point. This is actually false. Black 95 is essential, or black's corner can be killed starting with t15.

The rest up to that point was pretty good.

In order for your stone to be able to put pressure on your opponent's stones (exert influence, be a bully) it has to be strong itself, otherwise it's more likely to wind up a victim. This is where connecting becomes important. If it's connected to a group of living stones, it will be strong and can be effective. If on the other hand it gets cut off from its support line, you can kiss your influence goodbye.

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Patience, grasshopper.

@jts, your nice commentary would be easier to read if you edited out the kibbitz.

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Patience, grasshopper.

That makes alot of sense. I'm no good at capture so I rarely get into those types of games but that helped me realize how it could still effect my games anyways. I have trouble with capture situations so I always tanuki to try to grab more territory but I can see how it would be relevant even when base building (half completed bases need to stay connected in case they lose eye space). I just wish I thought in terms of capture but keeping track of all of that would drive me crazy, I'd much rather just tanuki during a fight to try to grab territory. Playing even a single extra stone in an unpopulated part of the board where you already have one other stone can get so many more points than a small capture battle loss.




I keep things close together locally so they can make a physical connection and have local influence and take territory but I had been having trouble keeping connected across the board so as to not get separated. Every time I make a move I expect it to either be helping to take enough territory to make eyes or to invade an opponents intended territory so I have trouble making a move like connecting or separating which seems to neither take territory or invade it. I think it's because I don't like dealing with capture and don't like dealing with killing groups.