In the Game

Last week I was forced to play against the Kobayashi fuseki, which is some sort of the mini chinese openning. Here you have the traditional sequence:

In fact, I liked the way the game developed for my opponent after Kobayashi's, so I decided to give it a try on my next game.

Today I played my first game in the Ibero-American Tournament 2008, against Hugo Scolnik. He was listed as a 1k in the registration process, but his currently unstable KGS level placed him near myself, at 5k.

After Black 5, white can answer at A, B for deffensive moves, make a low pincer at C, or ignore the threat and play D in order to avoid black finishing the sequence. What Black really desires is to get lots of influence at the bottom of the board, so moves which make him strong here (most attach-josekis) are welcomed as well as an approach at E.

In the actual game, white made a single-space jump and I made the proper extension to K4. Then he made an invasion exactly in the middle of the right side and I didn't know how to answer it properly, but I managed to get a decent result.

All in all, it was a very interesting game, involving an almost-seki where I finally decided to play safely and avoid the ko, one too-late invasion on a corner, and a huge yose blunder. Even then, after these mistakes I managed to retain some of the advantatge I had won in the middlegame and finally won by 0.5 points (lucky man).

The 10th Ibero-american Tournament starts this week. I expected there to be just a few dozens of players, but the final list of participants consist of 138 players, whose strengths range from Fernando Aguilar to low double-digit kyus. The tournament will be held in KGS and IGS and the inscription is already closed, in fact, if you speak Spanish you'd already be aware of this tournament through the famous Go-Prat, and if you don't speak Spanish or Portuguese, you won't be allowed to participate in this championship.

In order to make the pairings possible and somewhat decent there are 3 vars which create for different groups: stronger than 1d, between 1k and 6k, from 7k to 14k and weaker than 14k (according to KGS level). The tournament will consist in 8 rounds, played once a week, and the time settings will be faster than I usually play: 10 minutes and byo-yomi of 15 minutes per 25 moves.

Despite my last defeats in KGS, my rank has been stablished at 6k and, therefore, I will possibly suffer the consequences of being the weakest player of a group where I shouldn't be. On the other hand, this is a great opportunity to improve my level and learn from the ones who are stronger than me.

I'll keep you informed as the tournament goes by.

For some reason, and without realising it, my level has increased a little bit. On one game this weekend I lost by 0.5 points against a 6k, though I could have won if I had realised I was winning before yose. Improving my "counting ability" is one of the few things I really need to work hard on.

On the other hand, I've realised that I enjoy more and more watching others' games. Above all, the one where high dan players make nice unexpected moves, such as the game I'm posting today.

It was played on Monday evening between two 5d players. It has some cool life and death problems all over the game, right from the beginning there is a very basic one, and, in the latest stage of the game, a very nice and complicated one.

You can watch it HERE.

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

The first (and only) time I've been in a Go club a game between me and a 3d was set. He gave me 9 stones of handicap (for obvious reasons) and he ended up winning anyway. But there was a sequence where he was able to invade my corner, a corner which was 4x3, no more space available. I've kept that sequence in my mind in order to play it someday against my opponents.

Since noone wants to play ranked games against an unranked player, I was forced to use KGS' automatch feature, which game me a 3 stones handicap game against a 12k player. It's not that I'm not used to give stone handicap, but I can tell you I hadn't played Go this year, so I wasn't too confident about my reading ability.

Finally, at the end of the middlegame - beginning of the yose, my opponent happened to make a double-hane in the "right" place for me to try that sequence. See what happened here:

It is important to see that during the whole sequence everything is made on an atari basis or a major killing threat. The two first white moves are direct ataris, though sacrificing one single stone, while the third one (209) is a threat for the four black stones...