Life In 19x19

In this video, white played a surprising move in the joseki in the beginning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGavHiMQy8s

Yunxuan said he wasn't sure about the sequence, so I asked my teacher. Here's a summary of what he said:

There are a lot of subtle variations in this joseki, which are very interesting.

For example, I never considered directly cutting, like in your reference variation. It's cool, since white hasn't descended, yet, so can't respond the same way.

At my level, people usually always play one of the popular variations, so I've never really explored the non-popular ones during games.

I guess that's something I've got to do on my own time.

If you want to vary this boring joseki you can play the trick of s6 rather than r5 atari.

Uberdude wrote:If you want to vary this boring joseki you can play the trick of s6 rather than r5 atari.

Actually, I believe Yunxuan discussed this very trick in a youtube video. It's pretty neat.