Alejo's Tenuki

A couple of days ago I decided to buy two books I had had in mind for a long time. Being the fuseki and the tesuji my weakest points (I still think I don’t have strong points), I bought one of each category. Today in this post I’d like to talk about the tesuji one, the one I’ve already started devoting: the third volume of the Elementary Go series: Tesuji; written by James Davies and published by Kiseido.

The opinions in GoDiscussions highlight how useful this book is and it has received top marks by most of the reviewers. I happened to find by error an illegal copy on the internet so I could take a look at the book level and the writing style. After a quick glance I realised that the book could work wonderfully for me, so I headed for the library.

The level progression seems to be fine and today I reached page 40. I’ve got some sort of tesuji saturation in my mind currently, but I already start seeing the results, which is something that encourages me to go on. Where can I see my improvement? I saw it in page 40, precisely in this tsumego I’m going to show you.

White to play

I can tell you I wouldn’t have solved this a week ago. I guess I would have probably given up the white group in the corner and moved elsewhere or pushed at Q6 (poor me). Solving this tsumego without any hint, though having done some similar ones previously, helped to raise my moral a little bit this morning. I’d like to see whether I’m able of not to see this tesujis during a real game where noone says "white to live is possible".

I’ve left the solution in the continue reading section