Good evening fellow go-enthusiasts,

I have recently read and studied this article : http://gobase.org/studying/articles/miyamoto/ which has gotten me very interested in the 6-3 opening. I've been searching the internet for pro-games (and also high level amateur games) using this particular opening, but I have had no luck.
I would like to ask you to check all of your databases in the hopes that maybe you guys could find me a game.

Also if you have any other articles or pro games that feature peculiar openings I'd be more than interested to hear about them/see them. Lately I've been finding it very useful to expose myself to new and refreshing/peculiar fuseki. 3-4 and 4-4 is getting stale and peculiar openings get me out of the rut of mindlessly following boring joseki.

- Christos

I'll be happy to (I don't have access to my databases right this minute--but will look later). If you're interested in looking at fuseki, I highly recommend getting a good database.

It's very rare. In pros, I'm seeing 3 games, 2 with Zhou Junxun as black.

When choosing things like this, you're pretty much on your own to experiment. Good luck!

I get 9 games (out of over 70,000) using a combination of GoGoD, SmartGo (both of which I highly recommend), and a few other games I've picked up along the way. I've posted three below (the last one has a particularly crazy opening).

EDIT: As Shaddy pointed out, the third game is missing moves. I'm pretty sure I actually talked to TMark about this particular game at the US Go Congress. If I recall, the printed Chinese record of the game (in some kind of periodical/newspaper) is actually printed incorrectly. Also, this game is in the SmartGo database, but I don't think it is in GoGoD.

Here is one from 2000. Kim Seung-chun (w) and Ch'oe Kyu-pyeong (b)



Aoki Kikuyo (w) Jong-Hoon Lee (b) (2002)


Ma Xiochun (w) Luo Xihe (b) from 1997

That last one just looks like part of the opening got omitted (like the star point stones), because if you imagine there's star point stones there it makes a lot more sense.

This seems correct, but I prefer it the other way. I reject your reality and substitute my own.

To make up for the erroneous game record (which I've left in the original post for posterity):

Yang Chae-ho (w) and Yang Keon (b) from 1995.

And here is what SmartGo spits out for first moves in order of frequency.

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$c This is a label for the diagram.
$$ ---------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . d . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . a b l . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . g e c . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . m . h i . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . o k s . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . f j o . r . n t . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ---------------------------------------[/go]

_________________
Patience, grasshopper.

And here's a particularly odd game in which black manages to get in all but two of the 6-3 points:



Edit: Judicata already posted it.

_________________
Patience, grasshopper.

Thank you for all of your great contributions so far! Always looking for more peculiar fuseki though so keep them coming. I have to say I'm a little shocked that out of over 70 000 kifu there's only 9 that feature 6-3 openings.

As for the Smartgo print out of openings.. wow... I can't believe Tengen and 5-5 have seen more play than 6-3, madness.

The Ma-Luo game should almost certainly be excluded. There is in the GoGoD database a very tiny set of games (nearly all from China's New Physical Education Cup) where I am unhappy about the data. I usually mark them but this one I seem to have overlooked. This game is dubious on two grounds. One is the weird moves. The other is that Ma and Luo could not have played in the early stages of the 10th Mingren. Ma was the Mingren and the early stages were about finding a challenger (which was eventually Luo as it happens). In view of it coming up here, and the likelihood of never being able to confirm it, I've decided to delete it entirely.

For the record, GoGoD also keeps track of games where the number of moves is less than actually played or where variant moves exist. I believe we are the only people to mark these, but T Mark is also constantly adding extra or variant moves as we acquire new sources (at the moment, and as has been the case for a rather long time, this is at the rate of several every week. I mention this because some people may think there are games in MasterGo/SmartGo that are not in GoGoD, or vice versa, when in fact they show up as different games simply because SmartGo defines duplicates by the final position (so that a short version of a game and one with extra moves added appear to be two games).

For Christos, 6-3 as opening move is rare, but as first move in other corners it is passably common. We have nearly 70 games, ranging from early 17th century to 2008.

I'm happy to announce I just purchased GoGod (Mark Hall will mail it to me on monday) so I'll have a massive database to find these games in and help me progress :- ).

Still looking for peculiar openings though! 6-4, 6-3, anything!

Thanks for the info. The game is from the SmartGo database, I'm pretty sure; I think it was excluded from GoGoD.

At our GoGoD board lunch today, there was some conversation about similar games and I remarked that I had recently seen some in a Chinese book I was checking for games not yet in the database. I have now checked the book and can definitely find 7 games, mostly from the Japan-China friendship tours in the 1960s, where the handicap stones have been omitted, the colours have been reversed and the games have been published with these errors. There was another game between Kitani Minoru and Cho Nam-ch'eol with the same problem, but we already had the correct version of that game in GoGoD. John and I have a mantra about trusting printed sources, but sometimes Chinese and Korean material has to be double-checked for typos and misprints.

Best wishes.

_________________
No aji, keshi, kifu or kikashi has been harmed in the compiling of this post.
http://www.gogod.co.uk

Just for amusement, here is a game published in a Chinese book in 2001, which is supposed to be between Morishima Kaoru 7d and Ishida Akira 9d in the Gosei tournament in 1987. The strange thing is that the next game in the book is that very same game. I have no idea what this is!

_________________
No aji, keshi, kifu or kikashi has been harmed in the compiling of this post.
http://www.gogod.co.uk

Hah, this could turn into an interesting game to play!
All right, here's my guess --