Great game, love Lee's fighting spirit with the ko and how he squeezed every last drop of aji out of his dead top side stones to secure the centre. Also nice example of why s16 push and clamp in response to r16 is aji keshi.

Looking forward to the commentery on this one.

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"Tsumegos are for reading power and Tesujis for knowing which moves to read"

The three words that best describe this are as follows:

What.

A.

Game.

In some ways, I was disappointed by the last match, but both players really came to play for this one. Quite impressive.

This one left me in awe from the seventh move (I'm gonna have to try that in my Low Chinese games), to the amazing exchanges, to the ending ko fight. These players are really something special (which we all knew going into this). I counted at 113 and it looked like black was ahead a bit in terms of raw points - after all, why would Lee play such a move unless he was winning? Then Gu came rushing back in with enough fight to keep the game interesting.

I look forward to seeing the commentaries on this one. I know there was a ton I missed in my own look at it.

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"You have to walk before you can run. Black 1 was a walking move.
I blushed inwardly to recall the ignorant thoughts that had gone through
my mind before, when I had not realized the true worth of Black 1."
-Kageyama Toshiro on proper moves

I'm not going to be so brash as to say that Gu Li made a mistake, but...

...move 18 looks a bit overconcentrated and heavy. In the ensuing fight, Gu gets a small group, and Lee gets a corner and comes away with sente. By move 29, it feels like Lee is ahead.

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Help make L19 more organized. Make an index: https://lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=5207

I disagree. What do you mean 'heavy'? It doesn't make sense to sacrifice the approach stone because you lost all other invasion options like 3-3 and ko or 3-4 attach. You need to settle on the side. As for overconcentrated, if you criticise white for that you should do the same for black's iron pillar: it is overconcentrated compared to closing the corner with kosumi which is his next move here if white didn't invade. Do you have a better suggestion for move 18, or do you not like invading with 16? That seems a natural flow of the game to me, though playing one of the left corners could also be possible I suppose.

I think that result is comfortable for white. He is totally alive and not so small: his group has more territory than black's upper right corner as he lived without pushing at s16 and reinforced at r14 so can jump into the corner in the endgame in semi sente later (in fact that jump can take the eyes and attack and kill the corner as we saw in the game). This is a big downside for black compared to the usual r16 block instead of iron pillar. Also white can be content to have made the n4 q5 exchange earlier as black would not answer so submissevly with r7 present: black is overconcentrated here. Perhaps white would dream of making the r3 r4 exchange to bully black further but black would likely resist that.

The pro commentators agreed white was leading by move 38, though the blame for that is placed on 33 cap not being e14 (capping an alive group did seem strange to me though I suppose it's more about enclosing the top than attacking).

White's group is yet another (see previous game) example of a good Go Seigen group. Note how the entire quadrant becomes no man's land.

Partly posted as a reminder that GSG is 100 next week. Get the candles ready!

We've now seen 2 Chinese fuseki, 2 micro Chinese, and a cross fuseki that was presumably played to prevent a micro Chinese.

I can't help but wonder if Gu Li is going to go for a micro Chinese again in game 6. And by game 10 are we going to see other kinds of openings, or are these two openings the only ones they consider good enough?

I think there's a difference between what these players might consider "good enough" and what each player feels is their strongest opening. Even if neither of these players plays, for example, the Orthodox Fuseki, that doesn't necessarily mean they consider it to be inferior to the Chinese or Micro-Chinese opening.

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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.

http://gogameguru.com/go-commentary-lee ... go-game-5/

In the commentary by An Younggil he says that the result on the right up to 29 is slightly good for white and the blame for that is on black's unusual iron pillar rather than attachment in the corner. The corner being open is indeed a big issue here, and he mentions the overconcentration of black's lower right corner.