Life In 19x19

I'm reading "Fundamental principles of Go" by Yilun Yang and I'm learning some interesting stuff about thickness, influence and how it's radiated towards the sides from a well-developed corner.

Yilun Yang says one should be effective and thoughtful in choosing Joseki to radiate influence towards the important side, but I find his examples a little vague and contradictory sometimes.

If I got it right, it would be a great idea to start a thick wall facing in the direction of a stone you played before in the middle, to act as a long extension and the beginning of a framework. Alternatively, pointing towards a similar wall from the other side (either yours or your opponent's) and ending with an extension towards the middle is great.

However, when looking at it from the other player's perspective, the examples given discourage you getting any closer to your opponent's thickness, and insist you play with caution near such areas.

So from all this, I gather that having a big wall seems good in almost any situation (barring probably a well established and bulletproof moyo by your opponent, which is rare in the early game). So how do I prioritize such developements? Towards where do you prefer your walls to be facing? Weak enemy groups? Weak but high groups of your own?

Thanks!

Falcord wrote:So from all this, I gather that having a big wall seems good in almost any situation (barring probably a well established and bulletproof moyo by your opponent, which is rare in the early game). So how do I prioritize such developements? Towards where do you prefer your walls to be facing? Weak enemy groups? Weak but high groups of your own?

Towards the biggest openest area possible, ideally with sente and a pre-placed high extension in that direction too

The challenge with building great walls via joseki is that it requires the cooperation of your opponent. Joseki are standard sequences played by the two players together. By their nature, they tend to be more or less even exchanges. Hence you have to be careful. If you opponent is cooperatively playing the joseki that will build a nice wall for you in one direction, isn't it because they are happy with the compensation that they are getting on the opposite side? A teacher can put together some examples that illustrate a point, but that is different than successfully finding/creating similarly appealing situations in our own games.

In more general terms, every nice tall, thick wall requires a fair number of stones to build (both on the Go board and IRL ). Meanwhile your opponent is busy doing something with an equal number of stones elsewhere on the board. As a result, walls are one technique that can be used but are certainly not the road to an assured advantage. They can be a very enjoyable technique when we manage to maneuver the opponent right where we want them. So walls are worthy of study.

In almost all cases, you will also need to coordinate some additional stones of your own with your wall in order to get full value. Normally you want to pinch some of your opponent's stones between your wall and some confederates in such a way as to make life miserable for the invaders. This takes practice. In order to become skilled at it you will have to try and fail a few times: creating too narrow an area so that your opponent can laugh at you and ignore your efforts, creating too wide a space so that your opponent can dive in and get away cleanly, or creating the perfectly-sized space but doing so too slowly so that your opponent has locked up the rest of the board in the mean time. General rules will not carry you too far in learning to be a competent builder and user of walls in Go. There is nothing for it but to strap on your Nikes and "Just do it!"

Falcord wrote:Yilun Yang says one should be effective and thoughtful in choosing Joseki to radiate influence towards the important side, but I find his examples a little vague and contradictory sometimes.

Maybe you can post 1 diagram that you think is confusing and we can discuss it.

I will say that, although the principles in the book are pretty basic, some of the diagrams explaining it are not. The diagrams are really aimed at a high SDK/low dan level. The principles are extraordinarily basic stuff that any DDK should be able to understand, though. It's just what you think of as a "strong corner", "invadable position", etc. will transform as you get stronger. But the basic strategic ideas won't.