Written by alejo on June 14th, 2010
This week I’ve decided to start playing go, again. After some teaching during the weekend, I needed to play some serious games over the net. As a result I ended up badly beaten by a 11k in KGS, due to some huge careless reading – assuming that not reading at all could be considered careless reading.
Playing another game with a friend on a real board forced me to improve my reading if I wanted to win after another awful fuseki. After some pincering and counter-pincering we were both engaged on a huge fight for a side of the board. And there was another fight on the opposite corner. These two situations made me wonder about the power of a good reading ability.
In order to fix this weakness of mine, I’ve been trying to solve some problems on SmartGo. And there it was, this unexpectedly cool tsumego with black trying to live on the corner or connecting through D1. If I was confronted this situation during a real game as white, my first move would have been to play D1, just to tear black appart, but it would have allowed him to live on the corner withougt any benefit on my side. So my thoughts would have led me to play B4 and assume there was nothing to do about it.
First glance conclusion at this tsumego was nothing but a huge surprise: Black can be killed!! This could be incredibly useful for my games! After having spent a few minutes on this tsumego, I gave up. A2, B1, C1, D1 and E1 were the first moves from my unsucessful attempts. And there it was, the solution. Painfully simple and effective.
Since there are lots of branches in the sgf, I’ll upload a limited version on the image by the end of the post, as well as the sgf files loaded in Eidogo.
It all started with the position above: white failed to kill black during the real game. In fact, after having spent some long minutes thinking of it and trying to read sequences, I gave up and replayed the situation at the PC. Unfortunately, I couldn’t manage to get a successful result for white but I still wonder about the real chances I had of killing black. Can you kill black?
Well, here I leave the sequence to the first tsumego, as you can see it’s so painfully obvious and simple, it hurts.
And the full sgf loaded on Eidogo, so that you can explore as much branches as you wish:
