That's what happens when you 'think' and 'not check'. I mean I do it too, but I don't get things grossly wrong! 4-5 times?!?! That's absurd! He played it countless times in his prime! Okay you can count it if you really want to but it's gonna be a headache because it's not anywhere close to 4-5 times.
The normal Kobayashi (first of Kirby's diagrams, exact formation of black's 4 stones, white 4-4 in lower left can answer high or low, white top left single stone somewhere in corner) has over 20 hits from Kobayashi Koichi in my GoGoD with a big run of them in the 80s to early 90s. He still used it a few times in the 2000s. He also did it sometimes as white, and had it played against him (seems he liked to low far approach and slide).
Well, I have the definitive GoGoD (obviously) and I have 15 games where Kobayashi Koichi played what Charles Matthews called the "Kobayashi Formation" (not the Kobayashi Fuseki). By that he meant Black 7 at K4 or J4. There are 21 games such games involving Kobayashi, but in 6 he is White.
So I don't call that "countless", nor do I consider it far off 4 to 5. In any case, my memory wasn't so far wrong. He played it a few times then did abandon for a few years. I kept tabs on this opening to some degree in the past because Charles and I worked on the MSO site together where he first published his "On the Side" series, and we also included his articles in the GoGoD Encyclopaedia. I have not kept tabs on Kobayashi's much later career. Even so, as I've just said, that doesn't change things very much.
As to Black 5 being at R5, Charles did not call this the Kobayashi Formation (or Fuseki). What he said was that Black 5 was Kobayashi's later 'style', which is something rather different, and in no way can attaching Kobayashi's name to it as a fuseki or a formation be justified. It goes back to Genan Inseki and "countless" players before Kobayashi (and even among his contemporaries). Charles's reference to a "later" style is incidentally agreeing with my observation that Kobayashi eventually abandoned his Formation, at least for quite a while.
I was interested in the questions raised about Kobayashi Koichi's choice of fuseki. So I decided to have a thorough look.
Here is an image of my spreadsheet detailing KK's career with Black. I have 749 such games in my current database. The initial image here looks at the big picture choices that he has made. Most games are classified under six alternatives. The breakdown in the table is as follows:
Immed Appr = immediate approach against a diagonal 4-4
Diagonal = diagonal 4-4 or diagonal combo of upper right and lower left stones. The most frequent being the pair shown below with a white stone in the upper left.
NiRenSei = two parallel 4-4's, hopefully we do not need a diagram for this one.
3-4 3-4 Perp = Two parallel 3-4's with their orientation perpendicular to each other (my terminology) as shown below with white stones variously on the left side.
4-4 3-4 Perp = The precursor of the mini-Chinese or orthodox fuseki with a 4-4 and 3-4 where the orientation of the 3-4 is perpendicular to the 4-4 as shown below.
Note there are some issues with double classifications. For example, the following fuseki will end up as both a 3-4 3-4 perp (after the 3rd play) and a 4-4 3-4 perp (after the 5th play). There are a few different cases that cause the double counting. They are not a major factor however.
There remain 30 or so games that are unclassified in the table.
The second line in the image below shows the number of games in each category. Thus there are 749 total games in the list, 31 immediate approaches, and so on. In the right-hand column we see that there are 340 of my '4-4 3-4 par', the precursor for the Kobayashi. This has been the main theme with black throughout KK's career. Scrolling down the lest we can see that it has been more or less popular with him over the years but in the end has made up about 45% of his games with black. We will see what he (and his opponents) have done with that in a second post. My apologies for the size of the image but I did not have the patience to wait until I could figure out a briefer way to present all the information.
Kobayashi career1b.jpg (3.03 MiB) Viewed 8966 times
Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21
I'm not an expert on Kobayashi or on the origin of the term, "Kobayashi Fuseki", however, it was my impression that the term was coined since he used the opening a lot at a particular time in his career. This would suggest that his overall rate of using the opening as black is not necessarily expected to be high in aggregate, but should be high for a certain consecutive period of time.
GoBase.org wrote:
This fuseki pattern was not invented by Kobayashi Koichi but he was the most prominent player employing this pattern in top-title matches so soon the pattern became known as the Kobayashi Fuseki. This all happening in the 1980-1990 decade.
From this, I would expect to see a high rate of him playing '4-4 3-4 par' during this timeframe. From the data, however, it appears that he was especially fond of this opening between the years of 1988-1990, where we can see several consecutive entries of Dave's '4-4 3-4 par'.
Maybe this streak led to the coinage?
Unrelated note: the '4-4 3-4 par' could lead to openings that some might not classify as "Kobayashi Fuseki".
Here is a second image of KK's career with black that breaks down the "4-4 3-4 Par", Kobayashi precursor from the first image. Let me introduce the nomenclature here as I did previously.
White = White plays next on the part of the board from columns F through T. This is an artifact of the way that kombilo searches the database. The base search looked like this, where the letters marked major continuations. In the diagram below, Black continued with the Mark II Kobayashi at "a" 68 times. However, White continued with an approach at "a" 32 times!
White's play in the lower right arose either because White preempted Black's strategy by approach with move 4 or Black used move 5 to play somewhere on the left side of the board and ended in gote.
UL Approach = Black approaches the upper left on move 5. As shown in the last diagram this is sometimes double counted with "White". However, looking through KK's games this was clearly an important idea in his early career so I included it as a separate result.
Mark II = The Mark II Kobayashi as described on SL. Black uses move 5 to make a small knight's shimari in the lower right.
K Approach = The classic approach to a white 4-4 in the lower left on move 5. This is an invitation to initiate the Kobayashi fuseki.
Star Point = Again the classic continuation on the lower side star point with move 7. Notice the difference between the K Approach (55 examples) and the Star Point (29 cases) reflects White's active attempts to avoid the Kobayashi either by pincering the approach stone or by playing elsewhere with move 6.
Chinese = both the high and low variations.
In the image below we can see that Kobayashi played the Mark II more often than the K Approach (68 to 55) and he played the Chinese just as often as the K Approach (55 each). In addition, I have the impression (without having documented it) that he played elsewhere on the left side at least as often as he played the K Approach of the Chinese. However, we have to remember that there were a great variety of White formations on the left side across all these games. This naturally leads to some positions that favor a particular Black strategy and some that do not. As always YMMV but I hope that you, gentle reader, can find something of interest herein. Enjoy!
Kobayashi career2b.jpg (2.77 MiB) Viewed 8951 times
Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21
Also, one question about the data in the first of ez4u's interesting posts: from the description, it sounds as if all 749 games are ones where Kobayashi played as black. Some of the game entries are listed with the substring, "Kobayashi Koichi (W)". Are these also games where Kobayashi played as black? The title would seem to suggest they are games where he played as white.
Sorry for being obscure. The (W) and (B) are the way kombilo reports the winner of the game. The White player is always listed on the left and the Black player on the right.
Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21
Looking back at "streaks" in the data (i.e. groups of consecutive times he played it), both Mark II and Chinese opening have more streaks than pure Kobayashi from a rough glance, though he still played K approach somewhat often.
I suppose other factors could contribute to the term. For example, maybe some subset of these games were more often commented on than others. Or perhaps certain games were more memorable to viewers. Or maybe Kobayashi played the 'K Approach' more often than other pros around a certain period of time.
