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Go Books

That was actually the first move I looked at. Seems like an obvious first move. But I realized it did not work. I was about to post your solution when I saw you already did. But, the point of saying that is to point out, to Fedya and others, if you come close but don't quite make it then try to see if there are other, similar, sequences, or a slight change in the order which does work.

And always look for damezumari in a close fight.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

I doubt if I would have come close to solving this problem when I was 5 kyu.

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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Hi Bill,

I don't think there's any need to hide this. I have not read Wilcox's contact plays material, and maybe I do not really understand what he means by five alive -- or even if that is how he puts it. My guess is that in fights a string that has 5 dame is safe, as a rule. I have utilized it the other way, that a string having fewer than 5 dame may well be in danger.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Hi Bill,

Thanks. I actually bought his Contact fights over a decade ago.
He mentioned 4 libs, 5 libs, and other cases, if I remember correctly.
I don't recall the phrasing 5 alive in it; maybe he used it elsewhere.
And it's not really for life-and-death per se...it's for contact fights.

Thanks, Ed. I had a suspicion that the phrase, five alive, was someone else's formulation of Wilcox's original idea. And, no, it is not for life and death per se.

I still thought that it applied in this case, because without damezumari White can capture the three Black stones.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

"Five alive" is a catchphrase from the movie Short Circuit.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

I posted that problem in part because I found the solution (the app declared you correct after ) with White being unable to play delightfully surprising. The other reason is that it's yet another example of one of the big problems I have with my reading, which is that I find it difficult to see upcoming ataris until most of the stones are actually on the board. That's clearly a recurring theme.

Join the club!

That's why I said, a while back, Count the dame.

White starts with 5 dame. You saw the sequence on the left where the throw-in costs 1 dame and the atari of the Black stones costs another. That leaves 3 dame. If you can remove 2 dame from the top with sente, that leaves White only 1 dame with Black to play. Bingo!

It is all very fine to say, well I should be able to visualize the board after the sequence and see the self atari, but, as Krogius pointed out about the visualized image (in The psychology of chess), it is not as clear as what you actually see. Counting and keeping track of the number of dame is an aid not to be sneezed at.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

It gets easier with more practice, but...

Even pros miss ataris: https://youtu.be/noCZ5gwRBCY?t=58m54s
(Can't seem to embed youtube to start at a given time? Am I missing something?)

And that isn't even reading a future atari!

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Go Books

Hi sparky, a nice feature request.

Testing:
[youtube]noCZ5gwRBCY?t=58m54s[/youtube]

Today I may have had the first game in quite some time where i may have just flat out played badly. I blundered with , and compounded the blunder by trying to same all my stones. (Not that sacrificing them seemed like a very good idea either.) But in my other recent losses, I thought back and realized I had played well enough to get into winning positions before blundering. This time I'm not so certain. I was thinking for a while that if I just connected on 66 I would have had an easy victory, but then I looked even closer and have the sneaking suspicion that I was actually a good ways behind after . I'm not at all certain how I should have handled my opponent's moyos, but think in hindsight that the right side attempt was particularly a mistake.

My comments stop after . I did eventually save those three stones which became a whole bunch more, and resigned when I screwed something up in the lower left not long before the game would have gone to counting. By that point, however, I was well behind with no way to make things up. I didn't realize until after the game just how behind I was -- the thing is I didn't have much time to count during the game since I was spending all my time trying to work out how to save my stones.

is playable but jumping one further is better.
Attach at R3. bR2, wS3, bQ4, wQ5 should follow.
this is one point too far. It leave L3 behind and does not have a follow up extension. When the opponent makes a move like this you should try to steer the game so that the aji of that invasion becomes a problem or B.
Wrong side. Approach from the other side and then make a position at the top when B replies with this move.
Can still consider O17
Pushing again on the 3rd line is not good. Just hane then you can jump after B connects.
Why don't you want B to play there? It hold no interest at all for B as he cannot do much with it if you reply at N17.
Or you could ignore it altogether and play in the center somewhere.
Way too deep. You cannot expect to connect below. B should prevent that now and the lower group is cut off and eyeless. You should reduce from above and then aim at S8.
You should not have been allowed to get away with that. B's attachment was bad. Attachments are for defense, not attack.
way too close to the black position. Somewhere around M10 looks more intersting.
I don't understand this. Had he blocked you would have had trouble living.
This doesn't do much. How about J5, aiming that that aji and also the center?
E7 would connect in sente.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

68 @ H13

For a move like , I know there are several josekis possible, but I don't have any idea why your suggestion would be better than what I played.

And as for , I've always thought that if I played there, Black would respond at Q4 and then split at either R4 or Q5.

For , I thought if Black played there he'd be able to jump in either direction and leave me with two pretty weak groups.

For white generally plays a jump (often the two space) when white intends to build strength to counterpincer the pincering stone. Playing a knight's move to lean on the corner stone is a similar strategy. With the black corner stone high in the upper left, however, that will have some influence on the fighting. If you want to just settle fast (not recommended unless black is strong all around) you can attach at R3. You can play the diagonal move at Q6 to keep black separated and possibly start a running fight. You can counterpincer from the left side at various different points, and most of the other jumps have some reasonable lines that come from them.

The two space high pincer to the low approach was one of the common joseki beginnings in the mid-20th century, and so there was a ton of research done on it, if you want to look in a joseki dictionary. It will probably be the one with the most variations. The key, though, is not to just try and run out, but to think of what goal you'd like to accomplish (I want to attack this stone, or I want to get influence in this direction, etc.) and then try to think about moves and a line of play that could help you accomplish it, because there is so much flexibility in this situation.

For , if you play at N17, and black jumps in to the top side, first, black can't make a two space extension in either direction. Second, N16 is a big move for white that has a side effect of hurting black's stone, possibly in sente. Third, white's groups on both sides are strong, so black's stone makes an easy target for attack. What would black do if you just capped? Black might live inside, but white's outside strength would make black's moyo on the right quickly disappear, and likely keep the left from growing unmanageable too.

I guess I have to do more studying. I still have difficulty seeing what makes some of the joseki so much better than others.

And I know you and Bill Spight have talked quite a bit about capping moves, but I still find it hard to see how they (and other reducing moves like the shoulder hit) work well in practice.

The recently published Encyclopedia of Go Principles has a short section on using the capping move that I thought was pretty helpful. It's a very easy read; while not as in depth as many other books, it provides a useful overview of many important ideas.

Nobody said it was going to be easy.

After a long series of wins, I've had a number of reverses in succession, and KGS has demoted me back to 7k. It's been yet more games where I've had to fight, finally get a good position out of the fighting, and then make some mistakes that cost me an entire group.

What's probably more frustrating is that I have to engage in the fighting in the first place. Now, I'm not necessarily opposed to fighting; I find the sort of style I've faced in my limited forays onto the Korean servers to be bracing, like a cold shower. It's as though they say, "Lets fight with , because, well, why not? (OK, maybe it's not that severe.) But the sort of fighting I'm talking about isn't that. Instead, it's that I keep falling behind in the beginning and get to the point where fighting is the only attempt to get out of the holes I dig for myself. And I still can't figure out where I'm going wrong early on.

In this particular game, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out where my opponent's weaknesses were, and not having any idea. And again, I had weaknesses I didn't know about that my opponent had no difficulty exploiting, leading to my trailing badly and having to fight.