In the Game

This is a situation from a game I played last week.

As you can see, black has a huge territory on the bottom of the board. The two stones at C4 have been sacrificed during the game... or not?

Is there anyway you could profit from their presence?

Yes, it is possible to invade the bottom of the board by taking these cutting stones into account. If we played as shown on the next picture (what happened on the game) it seems possible to invade there. As you can see, black had to avoid that this cutting stones successed on their purpose and I took the chance here to invade.

Probably some better players can tell us that the invasion was killable anyway by some hard-reading exercise, but this was made on byoyomi, with around 30 seconds per move on a game between players at 9-10k level, so we didn't have much time to think. As the illustrator of "Empty Triangle" says: crap time runs out time runs out must move fast must think now no time.

There is a proverb which says: "five may live, but the sixth dies". It means that five groups of a single colour on a board may live (only may) but six groups are too much, and one of them will die. I realised how true it is a few days ago.

On Friday I was playing a very interesting game with Mr.MK, without any clock or handicap on real-life. My rival had been pincered on the upper right corner in the first 10 moves and, instead of invading the corner he decided to escape. I chased his group for over 70 moves... it was a huge group on the upper right side of the game which would give me the victory after its death...

A few moves later I realised my own situation: I found myself with 4 weak groups chasing a huge one (with only one group, yes, but it was a huge one). So, I had 4 weak groups on a single third of the board, plus the other ones on the board. I guess you can imagine how strong they were and how many liberties they had. Unluckily for me, my opponent, after a few minutes trying to save his group, realised that I had too many weak groups and attacked them, tearing them appart till they were reduced to minimum space and died.

So, in the end, he got a third of the board in this fight. His group was alive, he had captured over 20 stones (two of my groups) and had a huge influence towards the center... the game was over for me.

This game wasn't played on the internet and I didn't record it on my palm neither, though I don't know if I was lucky then... I hope to forget this game soon, though not the lesson I learned.

A couple of weeks ago took place the final game between MoGo and CrazyStones.

The game was played at KGS and clonned and commented by Guo Juan (5p). In fact, Guo recognised she had been defeated several times on 9x9 by Mogo; which surprised most of the attendants to the game and gives some credit to bots' strenght on 9x9.

As you can see on the game, Crazystone (Black) starts playing very solidly, trying to secure as much territory as possible. Mogo tries the opposite, he leaves some extremelly weak groups on the board on the chase of bigger center influence.

I strongly recommend showing this game to beginners, here you'll see two totally different styles of play.

If you click on "continue reading" you'll find the game loaded on Zgo and the link to the direct download of the fully reviewed game.