Dear fellows, go-enthusiasts,

I had this game on GoQuest recently, I was white and I was lucky to win, but the opponent, which is my colleague (he was pretty distracted, so didn't do his best at that match), heavily criticises me on the ground that it is not a "proper go" and my position had many weak points. He comes from 19x19 - played competetively in USSR many years ago, i.e. he is definitely an authority figure for me in whole, but in case of 9x9 in order to grow (I'm 1K on GoQuest 9x9) I think I need those kinds of moves, especially like 6 in the game below. On the other hand - I may be totally wrong. That's why I ask for your good advice - whether I (as White) played "properly".



Best regards,
Anton

I hardly play 9x9 and aren't very good at it, but I do know such 2nd line attachments are sometimes good moves. Indeed it's in a "standard" opening: tengen, side hoshi, mirror hoshi, attach under.

I think this is 19x19 reasoning that is much less useful on 9x9. The reason is that in 19x19, the game is sufficiently long and open that the notion of "weak points" is a good heuristic for "it's hard to read out every specific sequence but there's a lot of stuff that at almost works here". In contrast, 9x9 is small enough that moves tend to work, or not work, within just a few moves - playing with maximum efficiency often means walking the knife edge between "nothing quite works so I have 0.5 points more than you" and "something worked so you win by 20". So in summary, I'd say that leaving weak points efficiently is what 9x9 is all about!

I've attached a graph of the KataGo analysis of your game. Just 1000 playouts per move, but this is generally enough to believe the big swings (although things would change a great deal with move playouts). Note how the winrate swings hugely even though the estimated score difference (the purple line) mostly doesn't change much, that's because the game tree is simple enough for KataGo to be quite sure if it will win even if by just 2 points.

Since I like 9x9, here's also a review with some KataGo input. I'm about 2150 on goquest.

For general interest, here's another KataGo analysis with 10000 playouts per move rather than just 1000. As expected, it's similar to the first graph, but with some differences in details.

Thank you, Uberdude there’s a lot of room for improvement, though... and I also hope I will be able to play more 19x19 games...



Thank you, Afar, for this fantastic review. I will study it carefully, since not everything was clear for me from the first sight, but it’s super interesting! And unfortunately there’s no much information on 9x9 Go (apart from several discussions on sensei’s library and a couple of amateur books); like mostly you should be good at 19x19 in order to be good at 9x9. I hope I will be able to improve my game...

Best regards,
Anton