Life In 19x19

I would be very interested in any advice on the following game because it was as close to my best play as can be reasonably expected. I made a defense mistake at the very end. However, the reason for this was primarily that according to my count, it was very close, so I felt that I had to forgo any defensive move if I were not sure that it was needed. At move 207, I tried very hard to identify sente/gote/values with moderate success, so I would be happy with any information about this.

At move 230, you have to fight the ko. Not fighting it is tantamount to declaring that you've lost.

I looked all the ko threats and I was sure that I could not win the ko because of the asymmetric situation. Is this incorrect?

Hi Gotraskhalana,

A few ideas :

- feels really small at this stage. Approaching the upper left corner seems ok.

- , this is likely to give birth to a weak group, which will probably enable white to reduce black's potential in the bottom right. Playing at n15 looks interesting.

- , since black cannot find two eyes here anyway (and didn't need this move to prevent white from connecting his weak s13 group), I think it would be better to jump in the center first.

At move , black has three small, scattered groups (q16, f17 and c6), two of them quite weak, and his bottom right strength is not doing much, this is quite a contrast with the situation after . My feeling is that black didn't really have a plan for developing his position after and created small groups here and there while letting white play the big points (d10, c15, q10).

Gotraskhalana wrote:I looked all the ko threats and I was sure that I could not win the ko because of the asymmetric situation. Is this incorrect?

It's probably right, but you are already behind, so you've lost anyways. A ko at least provides an opportunity for your opponent to screw up, and black has at least a couple threats that are doozies. I only counted a couple really big ones for white too, so you're not in terrible shape. Black can also play the game move at any time in lieu of a threat, so it's not the biggest deal to run out of threats.