Life In 19x19

skydyr wrote:Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that the game was over. Just that black was left in a disadvantageous position and needed to play actively to confuse things and catch up.

I did think of a couple other things for later on, actually:

First, when white invaded the top right corner, I thought black might cede the corner for a wall facing left and then try to make a big fight on the top side.

Thank you Skydyr.
Indeed looking at the game later I should have blocked off the left side in the upper right corner.

Two nice games I played at the weekend.
I usually play blitz but this time we played slower games.
It seems I overplay alot and find myself constantly trying to chase my opponent, like playing out a ladder that doesn't work, and then being split myself into lots of weak groups. If one looks at game 2 I had to be chased to make two eyes and just two points with two of my groups, painful!!!!!!!!!!

Here are the games:

I'm seanachain!





Let the beratement begin!

My weaknesses as I see them:

1. Play too fast
2. Bad positional judgement
3. Difficult to tell when a group is weak or not
4. Can't use thickness effectively
5. Poor shape
6. Use aji too early


I will add more as I think of them.

More weaknesses:

7. Bad use of time in quick matches
8. Greed (When it comes to defending.)

Here is a game I played earlier today and ran out of time due to a misread on the right hand side at the end of the game. Pah, and even with White taking the stones at Q7 it looked like the game was still fairly close.

Had a quick game today.
For those stronger than me- what is the status of the black group in the lower left? We left it as a seki at the end of the game but I have my suspicions that it is dead due to the bent four in the corner rule. However I don't really quite understand the rule in its entirety so could someone have a look and enlighten me?

I’m just around 13k, but IMHO it B is dead in the lower left corner:

1. If B places a stone, W kills B

2. If W places a stone, B kills the small W string—and is left with the bent four in the corner (like you wrote), and thus W kills B.

As you say, B is dead. The point is that there is a ko for the life of the group, but B cannot start the ko, so W never needs to start the ko until he is sure he can win it. Under Chinese rules, a stubborn opponent can actually make you play out the ko - and before you did this you would play C19, Q14, S2, H2, etc. to remove all the ko threats.

But under Japanese rules, after both players have passed, you cannot use ko threats in one part of the board to re-take a ko in another part of the board. So therefore the demonstration if B challenges W after the game ("hypothetical play") is quite simple: A3 C1 A2 A1 B1 pass A3, and the black stones are captured.

Now, if (say) the E2 stones were locally dead but had a large number of liberties, then in either Japanese or Chinese rules W might have to start removing ko threats during yose, once B began to remove E2's liberties.

Thank you JTS!

This is a rule I was unsure of; "But under Japanese rules, after both players have passed, you cannot use ko threats in one part of the board to re-take a ko in another part of the board.".
Thanks for the explanation!