Leaving Aji for future purposes


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.

It is very common to use sacrificed stones for future purposes, so never give them up totally, sometimes it is just better to let them where they are and go elsewhere. If you push on sacrificed stones at the beginning of the game, you'll make your enemy stronger and you might win few points. Somewhat later you may find that they can serve you in a more profitable way. Maybe yes... Maybe not...

This entry was posted by Alejo on Wednesday, July 18. 2007 at 06:41. and is filed under In the Game. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own blog.

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    At some level, even before you play stones, you'll know that you will sacrifice them.. and later use their aji..
    #1 Chinmay on 2007-07-18 07:37 (Reply)
    Yes, I know it too... and you've just given me an idea for another post... when you make a cross-cut and then atari... you know you'll sacrifice one of the stones later on.
    #1.1 Alejo on 2007-07-18 08:09 (Reply)
    Not sure, but it looks like e3 might be a better response for black, to the first move. Even if w connects back, I don't think he can live in the corner. There, of course, would then be some aji to create some havock to the right of e3, but b would then be thicker there and could fight with a little more abandon.
    #2 uglyboxer on 2007-07-18 09:58 (Reply)
    Yes, I agree that there are better responses, but we were both playing on byoyomi and I think he answered automatically to the thread...
    Don't really remember the detail of how much time we read the sequence... But none of us is used to play fast games so it was a sort of training and, afterwards, we both confesed to be thinkint "concentrate,concentrate... time is almost up, play somewhere!!!" the whole time...
    #2.1 Alejo on 2007-07-18 10:07 (Reply)

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