Multi-eye-stealing tesuji
Lately I’ve decided to start playing go again through the net. Unfortunately, I still haven’t beat my online go anxiety syndrome, so I’m left with watching games on KGS or IGS. During my last night shift I could watch a blitz game played by one 6d and one 3d in KGS. I’m not telling their names since I didn’t ask permission for it.
Time limit for each move was 10 seconds. Taking into account that limit, blitz games tend to be somewhat chaotic and crazy… and still way above my reading ability.
Take a look at this section of the board: White to move.
As you’ll see, this required multiple eye-stealing tesujis on a row and sacrificing a kamikaze stone at S18. So black ends up dead. It’s not very difficult to read right now, after all the tesujis have been played and you have way more than 10 seconds. Would you be able to set this up so that it works with 10 seconds per move? I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t place K19 and R18 with the right timing.
After all, stone placing in Go has a lot to do with timing. And when real timing comes into action I must tell you it was black turn to play. Can black escape? You’ve got ten seconds. Play or give up some stones? What would you choose? Actually, they still had one extra byo-yomi period, so I’ll give you another extra 10 seconds.
The real black player couldn’t solve it during the game. After a minute, I was convinced that black would die anyway and I was obviously wrong. It wasn’t till I replayed it on a board that I realised my mistake. Black could have survived.
Not only survived. Let’s take a look at the whole board:
As you can see there is a white group floating right in the middle of the board. Actually, during the real game, chasing the upper black group only started as a response to black’s attack to H12 group.
So, now, make your move as Black on the board above. You have the real game and the solution in the game below:
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