Game review

Along my previous posts I've laughed pretty much about myself and my silly mistakes, but this time, I want to show a nice tesuji I played that not only made me win a game in which I was loosing bad, but left my opponent so pissed off that instead of resigning he let himself lose by timeout. I can hardly believe it worked, honestly I didn't have it all read out, but I knew that I had to exploit the aji of my surrounding stones. Check it out below. The sequence starts at move 180 on the lower left.

Game review: Most territorial game ever!

I believe the most boring Go game is one in which both black and white draw a straight line through the center of the board. Obviously this favors black as he extended one line further by playing first. White is then forced into a tough invasion with poor chances of success.

The following game I played at DGS didn't go to that extent, but wasn't very far from it. Not a single cross-cut was played (well, 2 actually, but they turned out being irrelevant), not a single fight (except the final invasion). It was sort of a peaceful conversation, "you take this, I take that, and we both shake hands". Even though I love this kind of play in spirit, I must admit that it is quite boring. What do you think?

Vice-versa

The following two games were played almost simultaneously against the same player on DGS. Both games turned out very territorial, no big fights were involved. In the first one, by the endgame I was ahead by about 10 points, but I left a defect that was well exploited by my opponent, who turned the tables and won the game. The same thing happened on the other game but the other way around! (well not exactly, by the endgame I was also ahead but by only 2 points). At least we both got our share, haha.

Lizards

Lizards have a great lesson to teach us Go players. They have the ability to drop their tail as a defensive mechanism. This is known as autotomy and literally means “self severing” or “self amputating”. A tail that has been autotomized will continue to move for several minutes, giving the lizard time to escape while the predator is focused in on the tail. 

If you don't believe me, check this video from YouTube:

The lesson is quite obvious. Many times when under attack, we hold on to our whole group without sacrificing a part of it, and end up trapped with a huge group.

The following game is an example of this. Things were quite fair by move 100. I was playing white, and had a four stone group deep into black's framework. For some unknown reason, I decided to rescue it by running away. While doing this, I helped black destroy my own potential territory. The runaway would cost me the game. In a probing (desperate?) move, I tried to take the offensive with move 158, that I can't recall as a tesuji, since the damage it produced could have been easily mitigated, if my opponent had only remembered our lizard friends. Instead, it led to a succession of mistakes, one after the other, and I ended up killing a huge group.

Addicted!

Recently, I'm playing a lot in turn-based Dragon Go Server. I always used to laugh about people when they couldn't take their eyes off the smartphone, checking out the latest comment from whatever social network they're stuck into. Well, that is me now when checking for my next move. I'm running about 20 simultaneous games, and I guess I'll leave this as my top limit, if not lower it down to 10. The problem gets worse because many of my opponents are as addicted as me, so they play many moves a day. Fortunately, sometimes I get a message like MySQL error: Too many connections. That forces me to wait for a while.

What I also find ironic is that instead of taking myself a lot of time to think about each move, since I have so many games going on, I have little time to spend on each one! (be right back, I have to answer 3 moves...)

A rule I impose myself is not to try sequences on a board before playing a move. They must be performed in my head. I don't know if doing it is acceptable or not, anyway I don't care if my opponents do it, I don't like cheating myself.

As a side note, I don't know why they call it turn-based as opposed to real-time, I prefer calling it correspondence games, after all, a real-time game is also turn-based.

The following game was played in DGS, in a period of 16 days. I find it interesting because, as usual, I lost an important fight at the beginning, Black was building a huge moyo so I had to dive into it, barely managed to run out, and in the process Black was in a nice position to cash in the whole bottom of the board. Then there was an exchange, I let him into my territory but got into his as well, and managed to cut his invading stones. At this point the game was close, but the final blow came when I killed his groups at the bottom, an he resigned. I guess the merit on my part was taking advantage of my opponent's distractions, if he hadn't done them I would have had no chance. Anyway I had nothing to lose, because the game was lost from the beginning.

Shortest game

It's pretty common that beginner's games evolve from one small battle into a huge battle. Neither want's to sacrifice a stone, nor has a whole board vision of where the big points are. With this in mind, the fuseki ends up being irrelevant, since the game result depends on this one huge battle. The following game in which I am Black is an example of this.