Life In 19x19

Bill raises a good point by criticizing 74. Let's look at the result there in a little more detail. We know that the result caused White a lot of pain in the upper right. But didn't White at least get some compensation on the top side? The short answer is 'no'. Even the top side was bad for White. Consider the diagram below. This is what it would have looked like if Black and White had played out the game exchange just before Black approached the upper left. Because of White's massive thickness marked at the top (even JF should accept this as thick!) White would never want to answer 1 with the knight's move at "a". More natural would be to play the low diagonal at 2 in order to prevent Black from attaching in the corner. But the eventual result in the game creates the same shape at the top with White playing next on "a".

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Bcm1
$$ ---------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . O O . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . W . . O X . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . O . . . . W . O X . O X . . . . |
$$ | . . 2 , . a . . W W X X . O . X . . . |
$$ | . . . 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . X . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . X X O . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . O O . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . O X . . . . . , . . . . . , O . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . X O . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . X X . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . O . . X . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . O . O . O . X X . . . . , X . . |
$$ | . . X O O X . . O O X . . . X . . . . |
$$ | . . X X O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ---------------------------------------[/go]

But let's also back up to the original Black attachment. You invaded Black's area at 1 below and Black ignored it to attach at 2. You wrote, "This move really irritated me, since it's indicative of a pattern in my games where my opponents get big moyos and there never seems to be any good place to reduce them, while my opponents invade willy-nilly and get good results."

But wait a minute! You were the one invading, not Black. What if you got huffy and refused to go along with this irritating move? What if White just jumps back to safety with 3 below? If Black hanes with 4 and White is the one to crosscut, the top is still going to get divided up somehow but meanwhile White has strengthened the center invader and the big jump at "a" is waiting as punishment for Black's audacity in playing elsewhere. What do you think?

Don't get me wrong, I am also the type of person who feels compelled to answer a move like Black 2 here. But sometimes second thoughts are worth thinking. Remember, "If someone throws you the ball, you don't have to catch it." Or as our own Bill has been known to say, "Tenuki is always an option!"

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Wcm1
$$ ---------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . O . O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . X O . . . . . 4 5 . . O X . . . . |
$$ | . . X , . O . . . O 2 . . O . X . . . |
$$ | . . . X . . . . . . . . . . . . . X . |
$$ | . . . . . O . . . . . . . . . X X O . |
$$ | . . X . . . . . . . . . . . . . O O . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 . . O . . . |
$$ | . . O O . . . . . . . . . . X . . . . |
$$ | . . O X X . . . . , X . 1 . . , O . . |
$$ | . . O O . . . . . . . . . . . X O . . |
$$ | . . X O . . O . . . . . a . . X X . . |
$$ | . X O . . . . . . X . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . X O . . X . X . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . O . O . O . X X . . . . , X . . |
$$ | . . X O O X . . O O X . . . X . . . . |
$$ | . . X X O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ---------------------------------------[/go]

As always, you've all given me a lot to think about. Going in rough order of the game:

First, with and other moves, I "let" Black get the double-wing. Not that that was quite my intention; my intention was really more not to follow Black around the board responding to everything he did. Black ended up getting more than I expected.

O4 as a reducing move on ? Not only would I never have considered it, it's the sort of move that if I had considered it, I would have rejected it on the grounds that I would have expected any strong player looking at the game to criticize it for playing too close to the shimari.

I invaded on both the right and bottom in large part because Black seemed to have an awful lot of stones on the fourth line, to the point that anything I would think of as a reducing move doesn't look to me like it would work very well. I especially didn't know what to do with the bottom I just knew I couldn't let Black get all that territory on the bottom. Perhaps I should have invaded the bottom first? In the game as is, would it have been better to attach at J4 or L4 instead of K3? Obviously I got a bit of luck with Black's jump into the corner.

Dave's sequence after is one that I don't know if I would ever have found even if I were playing on one of the turn-based servers and had a lot of time to analyze the game. I'm still at the point where any time I read up on corner invasions, I find myself getting lost in a sea of variations. I think it's the same difficulty I have with joseki, that being the question of figuring out what to do when one's opponent plays a move you haven't seen before. The rest of you obviously have a stronger ability to work out an answer on the fly.

I'm sure I'll think of more later.

O4 and P5 are quite standard reducing moves against the low shimari. My biggest problem is that I get lost in the followups to P5. It is very easy to make a heavy group.

[looks up sequences on SL]

The capping (ie. P5) sequences against the shimari are good for White?

Fedya wrote:[looks up sequences on SL]

The capping sequences against the shimari are good for White?

They can be. The key point is that you play them against a position where Black has invested four stones and has room for growth. If you avoid making a heavy group while limiting Black's profit, that can be good enough.

You have to compare it to playing a deeper invasion that results in a severe attack.

Fedya wrote:I invaded on both the right and bottom in large part because Black seemed to have an awful lot of stones on the fourth line, to the point that anything I would think of as a reducing move doesn't look to me like it would work very well. I especially didn't know what to do with the bottom I just knew I couldn't let Black get all that territory on the bottom. Perhaps I should have invaded the bottom first? In the game as is, would it have been better to attach at J4 or L4 instead of K3?

For L-04 looks better, and L-06, threatening L-04, also looks good. So does L-08, which is just above the sector line between F-06 and Q-09.

I've been thinking about it in light of another game I played, but is there a good way to figure out where to play to deal with an opponent's framework, or perhaps more importantly, WHEN to play? Or is there no substitute for good reading and positional judgment? I'm getting the impression that either I invade my opponents' frameworks too early, or realizing too late that an opponent has gotten a big framework and that there's probably no longer anything that can be done about it.

I'm also still trying to figure out the issue of my opponents consistently gotting lots of territory out of their frameworks, and my difficulty figuring out how to defend mine so they don't get reduced to next to nothing....

Fedya wrote:Or is there no substitute for good reading and positional judgment?

Well, there is basic knowledge and heuristics (proverbs, mostly). Not substitutes but supplements. Now that you know about the clamp at you will be able to both apply it and guard against it. That knowledge alone might have won the game for you.

Fedya wrote:I've been thinking about it in light of another game I played, but is there a good way to figure out where to play to deal with an opponent's framework, or perhaps more importantly, WHEN to play?

Your goal is simply to get one or two stones better. At your level it does not take much to achieve that, especially since you are already playing demonstrably better go. Books have been written about dealing with frameworks, but a few minor changes might be enough for you to handle them better and gain maybe one stone in strength. One is prophylaxis. For instance, a wedge on the right side would have prevented a Black moyo there. Also, preventing a double wing is almost never bad. Two is to play more reductions. They are often easier to handle than invasions. In this game you got lucky with your second invasion. A reduction was probably better.

So while L19 was down this happened:
I was actually kind of surprised, since I figured I'd have to win another game or two before the server finally bumped me up to 5K. Here's the game in question:



I haven't really gone over it, but there are a few things that struck me during the game:

I played K3 in response to a shimari on the left, and I was stunned at how passively my opponent played on the second line. I figured as long as my opponent kept playing there, why not keep playing on the third line?

I had a feeling I should have been a bit more aggressive in pushing at the top; I'm thinking something like N15 instead of N14. Letting Black make easy life on the top made me worry about how far ahead I was or wasn't. I did make a point to see that I had more liberties than Black's stones on the right edge.

I was very pleased in the endgame to notice that if I played the monkey jump at D19, I'd get sente on that side, and then be able to play the monkey jump on the other side as well. I did play a few slack moves (like letting Black get D13), but I had counted and was pretty certain the game was already quite won by then.

For the rest of the day, when I've been thinking about go, I've been asking myself, "How much better have I been playing?" I think finally getting to KGS 5k is partly a result of playing better, though, and not just one hot streak. Over on DGS (where I'm 6k), thanks to the ladder I've been able to challenge a 3k and have two other games going with 4ks. The game against the 3k is one I'm finding really interesting, and one I'm looking forward to posting here once the game finishes. I've been trying really hard, and felt like I was making a competitive game of it... up until one specific move when my opponent invaded and I couldn't figure out how to respond, and I felt like I lost a lot of ground. If the game had continued the way it was going before that invasion and I lost by a small margin, I'd be mildly disappointed, but mostly invigorated, feeling like I'd played a good, engrossing game, and just wasn't quite good enough to beat somebody that much stronger than me. That the game seems to have turned suddenly, however, is mildly irritating.

That irritation is also due in part to the fact that the two games against the 4ks seem, as far as I can tell, to have been going tough for me pretty much from the start. One of the things the three games have hit home for me is that I still have a really difficult time finding the weak points in moyos. I have a hard time finding the right point to play to reduce my opponents' moyos, while my opponents find weaknesses that I never realized I have -- a common theme I've been mentioning quite a bit in this thread. There are times where it feels almost random to me where I'm supposed to play to exploit my opponents' weaknesses.

So where do we go from here? First, of course, I'd like to be able to maintain a stable 5k ranking. And then, I'd like to play consistently competitive games against 4-6k players, not that I've gotten to play many even games against 4ks. If I can play well enough to make it to 4k in a relatively short amount of time, that would be great, but that's a bit later. The big thing is that, since I was bouncing between 6-7k for a good six years, with the exception of about a half dozen games as a 5k in the spring of 2011, getting back to 5k felt like a huge hurdle to overcome. And the consistency is a big thing, too. Every time I look at my rank graph, I've seen steep slopes where I won a bunch of games and got close to 5k without getting there, and other steep slopes where I fell precipitously quickly -- and even a few times where I ended up back at 8k. That, combined with some of the parts of the game I have difficulty with, have long made me feel as though my play is wildly inconsistent, with an inability to figure out what I've been doing differently during the winning streaks from the losing streaks.

Congrats!

Congratulations!

Keep up the good work.

A few comments.

I suppose we can tag this as evidence that members of L19 increase in go strength when the site's not up. We're too busy posting to improve, otherwise!

On a more serious note, congratulations, Fedya. I'm happy for your accomplishment.

The one thing I'd say quickly in response to Bill is that on I was more worried about the clamp than the cut. But your alternative moves apparently make the clamp not work either.

Belated congratulations on getting to 5k! I hope to follow in your footsteps

On moyos, you might try Attacking and Defending Moyos by Rob van Zeijist and Richard Bozulich. It's on go books and I think available through other sources. I read through it recently and it has answers to the exact questions your asking.

I have good news and bad news.

When last I wrote I was in the middle of a bunch of games on the DGS ladder. Two of them were against 4 kyus, and both wound up very badly for me, with fairly early resignations. But the game against the 3 kyu wound up in a tight endgame, and I was trying to do everything I could to keep sente. And then my opponent blundered and I got a comfortable victory! I had White in the game, and looking at it, I get the impression that Black played some pretty slack moves. I think I played quite well, but I probably could have been punished severely at points. I'll also be curious to see how well (or badly) I played the endgame. I spent a lot of time on it and still missed G7.

I just wish I could play like this consistently.