Terrible Tesuji (and how to develop it)

[Koosh]

Positions.
Often times, I feel that there are more possible positions in Go then cells in my brain , and yet every day I see professional players crush weaker players with moves that seem to just appear out of thin air and slam them where it hurts the most.

Now, I spend a lot of time studying Life and Death but still can't seem to make this happen in my own games - especially handicap games. I feel that there are plenty of people here who can relate; people who seriously study life and death and still have trouble applying this training actively to their games.

I struggle to kill something because if I don't, I'm feel certain I will lose on points. I feel that the gap is very hard to close unless something dies (incorrect thinking??).

Given 6-7 stones, a strong kyu player will lose nearly 100% of his or her games when playing against a professional skilled in tesuji. Is the weaker player making mistakes, or is the stronger player using a style that supports this tactical finesse?

Is it simply a matter of understanding what is going on with top precision gained through many hard years of active L&D practice, or is it "something else"?

Your thoughts on life as we know it and how to release the Terrible Tesuji™ and terrorize with it are welcome.

[amnal]

Positions.
Often times, I feel that there are more possible positions in Go then cells in my brain

Wikipedia + some quick maths suggests that the number of possible positions in Go exceeds the number of cells in your brain by about 159 orders of magnitude.

This reminds me of the fun fact that when you give a deck of cards a good shuffle, the probability of your deck being in an order that has never before existed is approximately 1.

[daniel_the_smith]

I think the way to do it is to teach your opponent the terrible tesuji skills...

[prokofiev]

Is the weaker player making mistakes, or is the stronger player using a style that supports this tactical finesse?

I suspect you need both forced and unforced errors. The stronger player usually creates complications or "asks questions" of the weaker player.

Positions.
Often times, I feel that there are more possible positions in Go then cells in my brain

Wikipedia + some quick maths suggests that the number of possible positions in Go exceeds the number of cells in your brain by about 159 orders of magnitude.

Fortunately there are vastly more brain states than possible positions in Go.

[gogameguru]

I don't have any magic solution, but here's my two cents:

• - Solve lots of tesuji problems (even easy ones) very quickly - this will develop your instinct (solving lots of easy tesuji problems helps you get better at finding hard tesuji too, somehow...)
  - Play games where you actively try to play as sharply as possible, instead of just opting for the easy variation
  - Study the games of a pro who has a powerful tactical style e.g. Sakata Eio, Gu Li or Kim Jiseok.

Also, accept the limitations of what's possible. You can't always pull a tesuji out of thin air, but when the opportunity arises you want to have trained enough to see it at a glance. Many times in real games opportunities for tesuji are not as clear cut as they are in problems, but you can set them up once you recognise the shapes. Most really severe moves never get played, and are implicit, unless you're playing a handicap game as white. You may be surprised how much you gain by just making sure you spot the easy tesuji consistently.

If you feel like you often need to kill to win, don't just focus on tesuji, but middlegame in general. Maybe you need to learn more about playing indirectly and gaining profit through double threats. Playing indirectly is one of the real joys of Go.

For tesuji, some excellent advanced books are Fujisawa's tesuji dictionaries from Slate and Shell. The first two books (of four) 'Tesuji for Attack' and 'Tesuji for Defense', are very practical. For solving problems quickly, Lee Changho's set of six tesuji books is very good (these are available in Chinese and Korean). For middle game, if you've read the classics like Davies' 'Attack and Defense', try Bozulich's 'Get Strong at Attacking' (both Kiseido).

Also, Oromedia's 'Train Like a Pro' has a good selection of reasonably high level tesuji problems mixed in with life and death, opening, endgame and other problems.

I hope this helps.

[snorri]

Given 6-7 stones, a strong kyu player will lose nearly 100% of his or her games when playing against a professional skilled in tesuji.

But the pros who are unskilled in tesuji are clearly easier to beat, right?

[Sheeple]

If you are 1d or weaker, there is an incredible amount of aji keshi in each game. It's a real disease. The weaker you are, the more each
position is played out leaving no aji, for DDK this means even endgame exchanges in fuseki. This does simplify the game a lot, but obviously
all other possibilities in the position are gone.

If you could play only moves that have a clear purpose appropriate to the game stage, tesujis will naturally appear, and because you have a clear goal to accomplish you can find them. Of course the stronger you are, the earlier you can leave a position alone, while a weaker player must still continue until the status is obvious.

TL;DR: Aji keshi is the natural enemy of tesujis

[PeterHB]

I suspect part of the missing magic is teaching. The pro has experience from teaching of the types of faulty thinking that people have at different levels due to teaching lots of people. So he can induce you to make a typical faulty kyu move. ( a sort of anti-kyu move, analogous to an anti-computer move. ) Perhaps he only has to achieve this once in the game to win. If the effect is to kill one of your 4 or 5 groups, he gets maybe 2 chances to do this as miai choices in the game. So I'm guessing this is worth 2 handicap stones.

So if there is anything in this guesswork (that might just be rubbish!), the way to develop it is 1) to be stronger than your opponents & 2) engage in teaching weaker players to learn typical weaker player mistakes.

[Bill Spight]

Now, I spend a lot of time studying Life and Death but still can't seem to make this happen in my own games - especially handicap games. I feel that there are plenty of people here who can relate; people who seriously study life and death and still have trouble applying this training actively to their games.

Part of the problem is that many real game life and death situations are quite difficult. You need to study high level tsumego to see them as problems. But many are not so difficult, even if they are not particularly contained. Basic life and death knowledge applies to them.

Given 6-7 stones, a strong kyu player will lose nearly 100% of his or her games when playing against a professional skilled in tesuji. Is the weaker player making mistakes, or is the stronger player using a style that supports this tactical finesse?

6-7 stones should be an inadequate handicap. It is rare that a pro would rely upon tricks to win such a game.

Your post prompted me to look at ancient handicap games between pros and sometimes people who were almost pro strength. (A 9-dan used to give a pro shodan 4 stones. ) In nearly all of these games White was playing to win. It seemed to me that in Japan there was a slow shift away from tactical games to a more strategic approach by White.

Here is a four stone game, with a few comments added by me, from the late 19th century. It is billed as a teaching game, so perhaps the handicap was too small, but it shows the strategic approach I mentioned. Also, life and death played a large part in the game, and I make a few comments about that.

[SoDesuNe]

Thank you very much, Bill Spight! As always a wonderful insight!

What I like the most about that game is how White just plays normal but efficient moves. Just threatening to exploit Black's weak shapes and wins because Black can't keep up fixing his own mistakes.

Everytime I give handicap I immeadiatly feel pressured to play a complex Joseki or some sort of magically but non-suji moves. I really should practice patience and believe in the reason, why I have to give handicap in the first place - I'm stronger! : D

[Koosh]

Thanks to Bill and all other posters for your insightful comments
I hope to be able to post my own game some day.

[Celebrir]

Really a great game. I guess I would have felt desperate at the moment you wrote "White is not desperate"

[Atsumori]

I'm not a very good Go player- I've known the rules for a long time, but I've played very intermittently, mostly before online Go was available. I've only recently started playing again, and I've been told I am about 10 kyu (not sure what rating system,) so I'm a much weaker Go player than you are. But I used to play Chess semi-seriously when I was younger, and I think there are more parallels between Go and Chess than you might think.

I think it's really interesting that a lot of Go players solve a lot of easy problems quickly. I came to think that this was something Chess players ought to do well before I had heard about Go players doing it (though at the time I came to think this there really weren't any collections of easy Chess problems available, despite the fact that Chess has a much larger literature in English then Go does.) I thought that (and still think it, though I no longer play much Chess) based on my experience playing (and generally getting destroyed by) really strong players.

I noticed that it wasn't _just_ that they could find combinations better than I could (though they could, of course.) It's that nice tactics occurred a lot more in their games (which is exactly what you are talking about here, I think.) Why? Well, the standard explanation in books on Chess is that better positional play naturally leads to tactical opportunities. There's some truth to that, but I think the actual truth is more complicated (so much so that that maxim, as it is stated by many books on Chess, is misleading.)

The thing is that a grandmaster has an enormous library of positions in his head, and doesn't have to read to see that some sort of tactic can occur in a certain position. So he can play a perfectly solid move that requires you to either move closer to that tactic being real, or give something up. Since you (a hypothetical you who is not as strong as the grandmaster) can see the concession, but you can't yet see the tactic, you play away from the concession, but toward the tactic. This goes on for a few moves, and the concessions get worse and worse. By the time you notice the tactic the only way to avoid it is to make a concession so large that it loses the game. Or maybe you don't notice it until the forcing moves start and you lose that way.

Basically, the grandmaster is very good at squeezing you between the Scylla you see and the Charbydis you don't. It's not surprising that you founder on Charbydis in most games. And this isn't directly about reading- the grandmaster sees Charbydis so long before you do because an enormous amount of positions have become instinct for him. He knows there is a tactic down some branch of the game tree without having to read through much of it.

So, I don't mean to be presumptuous here, since you could probably give me nine stones and win handily, but I think that the way you get better at making tactics arise is to get to the point where you can see them without reading. That means that you can look just a few moves down a variation and see that it leads to a complicated situation that is a tactic for you without having to read it out. Then you can squeeze your opponent against that branch- even if they see it in time you can (hopefully) make them pay a tax to avoid it.

[Bill Spight]

Now, I spend a lot of time studying Life and Death but still can't seem to make this happen in my own games - especially handicap games. I feel that there are plenty of people here who can relate; people who seriously study life and death and still have trouble applying this training actively to their games.

I struggle to kill something because if I don't, I'm feel certain I will lose on points. I feel that the gap is very hard to close unless something dies (incorrect thinking??).

The main value of L&D in handicap games, IMO, is living when you shouldn't, moreso than killing.

Given 6-7 stones, a strong kyu player will lose nearly 100% of his or her games when playing against a professional skilled in tesuji. Is the weaker player making mistakes, or is the stronger player using a style that supports this tactical finesse?

The weaker player is making mistakes. The pro is giving insufficient handicap. Why induce mistakes in a teaching game?

Is it simply a matter of understanding what is going on with top precision gained through many hard years of active L&D practice, or is it "something else"?

There are many skills in go. L&D is not everything.

Edit: Oh, another post that I have replied to before.

[cyclops]

Edit: Oh, another post that I have replied to before.

Don't let it get worse!
edit: I like the game you posted before. So many tesuji's!