Alejo's Tenuki

Last week I happened to lose a game, I was totally beaten. Even I could count the points I had on the board… In order to practise yose a little bit, I asked my opponent if he would mind playing the game till the end, though assuming I had lost.

After a short while, he accepted my request and so we went on playing. We went on playing and I was shown a couple of tesujis I hadn’t realised. In the end, my opponent made a invasion in a 4×3 corner, killed my group and shortened my score by a bunch of points. We held a nice conversation about the life-and-death situation of some groups and the whole game. A couple of minutes later, my opponent confessed he had been impressed by my petition and thus, he happily accepted.

I regard that game as the most didactic one in the whole month.

Mental note: Noone is polite, if you are polite, people are more willing to teach you.

As easy as it seems, very few people are following this rule. Though KGS still retains a friendly atmosphere, usually only 5 words take place during the games: hi, gg (stansds for good game), good luck, thx  and bye; going somewhat deeper within the game may come back as a nice reward.

This is a real situation which came up in one of my games:

As you can see, white threatens to make an eye around O4 and around T5. Actually we both thought that white was going to die and so it did during the real game.

W1 tries to move the vital point,  B2 plays in the new vital point, W3 makes an atari at the two black stones, threatening to make an eye at O4. Unfortunatelly, I thought I could play some sort of eye stealing tesuji by playing at Q3 after white plays Q2; having realised it was impossible I had to retreat myself and play at Q1, which happened to be sente and allowed me to play T3, thus removing the eyespace.

Afterwards, during the review, we realised there was a path which would have led white to a secured life… Can you find it?

In fact, it’s easier that it seems… so I’ll upload the sequence and some variations on the next post

I can’t do anything but congratulate Heretix for writing the subs of this game between Lee Chang Ho and Cho Hun Hyun, played in 2002 on the 6th LG Semi-final match, commented by Hua Yi Gang 8-dan.

There are a few interesting variations on the fuseki and the explanation of some unexpected moves by both players.

Here you have the link to the original post: Link to Godiscussions.com

Wouldn’t it be great to have more of these videos??

Today I saw an interesting game in KGS between two 6 dans. From the very beginning, each player settled an are of influence and black was the first one to attack. It wasn’t long before black had already reduced a big deal of white’s zone, so now it was the turn of the white player to invade black’s area of influence.

The resulting invasion was something rather spectacular, with a big white dragon trapped between a couple of black groups as seen in the image above. But, all of a sudden, white found a tesuji with unforeseen consequences. Can you find the first move?

Now the game turned into an all-in-all game, whoever won this capturing race would win the game. Let’s take a look at the board after having placed the appropiate stones:

The next move by black was S1, followed by W P1, B deffenses atari, W P11 in order to reduce black’s liberties, Black S3 was very polemichal and white deffended the atari and plays the vital point at T2. As you can see by the sequence, white started reducing some of the liberties of black and the latter only has 2 liberties remaining against 4 for white.

Is there any possible sequence which would have given the victory to black?

Here you have the full game:

A few months ago, David Fotland released the 12th edition of “Many Faces of Go”. Following the patterns of its predecesors, MFoG most important changes remain within its engine.

According to its author, MFoG is supposed to be 5 stones stronger than the 11th version and, in year 2008, he proved to be the best engine by winning the Go tournament in the 13th Computer Olympiad (see Game results). Currently it’s supposed to implement some Monte Carlo analysis over the traditional knowledge, so as to make it much more powerful.

If you visit its homepage, you’ll see this list of the major new features of this version:

I’ve just been playing with the new 1.02 version of Universal 3D Chess and having fun with a couple of new features. Acutally, they might not be the most useful features in the net, but the video export may be welcomed for viewing games when the platform doesn’t allow SGF files (i.e. some portable devices).

Massive rendering allows you to activate at once lots and lots of games on your screen. The first attempt I did, loading 100 games at once was quite funny, but then I overclocked the graphic card just to find out that 420 games loaded at the same time is too much for my computer. Anyway, here you have the picture of the 420 games:

And, on the next video you can watch a sample made with the new “video export” feature.

The video above has a 720×480 resolution with 25 images per second and lasts for 45 seconds. The total file size compressed with Xvid with 80% rate is 5,41 MB.

Here are the specifications of my laptop, so that you get an idea of how this might look like on yours:
-Dual Core T9100 (2,5Ghz, 6Mb Cache L2).
-4 Gigs DDR2.
-Nvidia 8600GT overclocked to 8700GT.
Obviously, the graphics card is the slowest part of the whole, but it still gives good results when it comes to Go graphics

Indeed, any Quad Core with a couple of 9800 GTX working on SLI may easily reach the 500 games with a decent frame-per-second average. I’ll be waiting for your images.