Life In 19x19

kvasir wrote:It looks like the 5 stone game was uploaded today on youtube or is it a new game?

It's a new game. There are now two 5-stone games in the series: Nakane resigned game 8, but won game 10 by 18 points, looking well in control after some carnage at the top right.

Nakane won Games 10 and 11 of his match with Katago, at 5 stones and 4 stones respectively. The final game of the match will be at 3 stones.

Game 11 (4 stones) looked significant to me in a couple of ways. One is that Nakane seemed to decide to go for the win come what may, and so eschewed his normal messing around, i.e.. he did not play to the gallery.

But I felt that made it much more interesting for us humans because Katago was obliged to play a very simple strategy, and so for once it was possible to get a good idea of how it "thinks".

By move 42 it had taken three small corners in return for influence. The other corner remained empty. That meant Katago already had a little over 30 points in the bag and could guarantee another 10 points in the still empty corner. Black had 0. So, if we take the average number of moves at around 250 and allow for the usual dame, leaving possible territory at 100 points, Katago was already very close to the finishing line of 50+ points.

Black 's position, meanwhile, was all influence. No territories, no moyos, no real thickness even. And not a single white sausage to chomp on.

Katago invaded the huge empty centre and flitted round like a butterfly as Black tried unsuccessfully to find a way to attack it while making territory. The butterfly grew and grew but did not make any territory itself, until near the end, Nakane made a mistake under time pressure and lost a handful of stones in the centre. But he recovered a little with a neat tesuji and captured a small piece of the butterflies wing as compensation. Just as well he did, because after 254 moves he won by only 7 points. His huge initial influence translated at the end into about 30 points more than White in the centre, and so it ended up looking like a fair four-stone game, but the tesuji might well have been missed by non-professional Black players. Apart from this one episode, though, we can't really say that tactics dominated the game. It was essentially a numbers-game strategy. One point that Nakane did make, though, was that his opening play meant that by the time the endgame was reached, his central positions were automatically thick, and so he could make accurate boundary plays with no problems.

My interpretation of this game is that Nakane could be close to guaranteeing a win on 4 stones every time, by using the same strategy (and assuming Katago does not change), especially if he had a little extra time (which I think would barely benefit Katago with this strtategy). But I would not back him confidently on 3 stones where there is a totally empty initial corner, and so a lot mpore strategic choice for Katago.

In short, it was a VERy interesting boring game!

Nakane lost the final game of his 12-game match, by 4 points taking 3 stones.

The overall score was 8-4 to Katago, Nakane winning on 3, 4, 5 and 6 stones, but losing on even, 1, 2 (twice), 3 (twice), 4 and 5.

He didn't say much about what he learned, but it was noticeable that if he played modestly, the games were closer. In the last game, he made a turtleshell and in general played thickly (in the endgame sense), and had two corners, but could not make any big territories, apparently because he never attacked White anywhere.