Alejo's Tenuki

Last list of recommended articles started with Cho U recovering from one lost in the Meijin Title. A couple of weeks ago, Cho U managed to win his second game on the finals; so currently the result is Cho U – Takao Shinji: 2-1. You can track the games at 361points.com.

Talking about the professional Go world, we have a new incorporation to the Go Blogsphere: Cho Hye-yeon (Korean 7p) writes her own blog at Full of surprises, where she talks about her last games, how she faced 132 mirrored moves (except for a move) during a pro game and other experiences related with Go.

If we refer to computer go, we have a couple of good posts made lately. The first one of them, made by the creator of Deep Blue, Feng – Hsiung Hsu: Craking Go at IEEE spectrum, where he talks about the future of computer go while making a correlation with the development of chess software. As resources should always be mentioned, this was referred to by through computer-go mailing system.

The second one involving computers can be useful for most of us. Xed-over, at GoDiscussions.com, mentions a command-line based way to use Gnugo in debug mode… Personally, I think the best thing you can do is to try it and you’ll have a nice surprise, it is very easy to use and the weaker you are, the more it’ll help you. There has been a lot of computer activity at GoDiscussions since there are even two posts going on at the same time talking about ranking and club managements software: 1 & 2.

Another interesting post at GoDiscussions.com, not focused in Go but in intelligence, there is “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments“. It’s a scientific research on this field which awesome results.

On more Go related, we have the The Gokyo Shumyo a day Calendar: “The Gokyo Shumyo is a classic tsumego text considered “required learning.” The tsumego range from very easy to very hard.”

(this post tries to be as objective as possible)

One of the first post I wrote on this blog was about Moyo Go Studio being released freely on the internet by its author, Frank de Groot.

Last week the Go community (the whole Go community) received very bad news:

Moyo Go Studio is not being maintained any more and the company that sold it is out of business.

For quite a few years, I fought an uneven battle against the “Go Software Millionaires” (John Fairbairn, Anders Kierulf) and other “Powers That Be” (Jan van der Steen, Arno Hollosi, AGA’s leadership’s intermediate Philip Waldron).
These people, for financial, ideological or ego- reasons, did not want the product to succeed, and used their clout to initiate a comprehensive boycot of Moyo Go Studio.

Recently, after having perused the website that used to be here, oogle Inc. offered me a job.
This event helped me to see things in their proper perspective, to call it quits on Moyo Go and move on.
Not to Google, but to working on a new software project.

To those customers that protested against the censorship I say thank you and sorry it had to end this way! To those customers who did not: Please don’t email me – it’s too late to change anything.
There will be no more weekly pro games, and due to lack of public interest, I have deleted the sourcecode – making room for my next project.

Frank

This text is extracted from the original MGS site. As you can see, Frank has stopped the development of Moyo Go Studio. And yes, bad news for everyone.

During the last year, there has been a lot of controversy around MGS. You could like Frank, you could dislike him, you could be against his methods, you could just enjoy the result… these are all subjective points of views, but the point, the real fact, is that he was a big Go programmer.

Beyond doubt, Moyo Go Studio is a big program, so full of features you could be exploring them till the extenuation and a reasonable amount of them were exclusive of this software. The computer-side requirements were quite high, but as a reward you had real-time pattern matching which can’t be found on other programs.

The beginning of MGS controversy started with the games collection… and moved on to the forums due to the lack of Frank’s lack of self-control on the internet. And, though it is not possible to settle who shooted, a war started at one of the most important Go communities on the internet: Rec.Games.Go. There you can find most information on the topic.

His program was censored from Sensei’s Library. Uncommon decision by its owners, as it contradicts the fundamentals of the library: “Sensei’s Library is meant to be a place where Go players can meet to find information, contribute information and discuss any items related to Go. (…) You are encouraged to contribute to existing articles and add new ones. Your wisdom will then be available to all subsequent users. You can expand entries and correct mistakes if you see them, or add comments, etc.”
Consequently, if a program is banned from that library, then knowledge is being “deleted” or, at least, it makes much more difficult for common users to reach information.

The American Go Association published a review about Moyo Go Studio which I can’t reproduce here for copyright reasons. Try to get a copy by yourself, compare it with reality and get your own conclusions.

Personally, I don’t know who or what was behind that review, nor do I want to know it. I’ll keep on playing Go, but I think this terrible lost should warn us about the internet Go world. Not everything is as nice as it seems and, currently, there is only one online resource of Go knowledge (with all it carries).

We all know what is a Hane, but what about the double hane?

On the right side we have a sample. A double hane is when you hane twice in a row on the same group. Here you can see how the stone 1 is limits white’s growth in this column, so white has to move one line back. Black’s 3rd stone pushes back white even more. Depending on the surrounding situation, white can play A, B or C.

A will be played if white is strong nearby and he isn’t afraid of leaving cutting points. C will be played if white is very weak in this area and needs to protect the cut at all costs. B is somewhere in between this two positions, it defends the cut, but not as well as C does, and it is less passive than C.

This is a very important technique to apply into your games, but it is a double-edged sword. It can be of great use, pushing white back 2 lines, or even killing him. But it can also lead to a situation with two weak groups floating in the middle of the board because of the cutting points left during the double hane.

On this side we have one clear sample of a good double hane. As you can see, black played 3 making a double hane against the weak white groups.

White now is forced to defend his stones somehow, either A or B are good moves, though defending the cuts directly is not bad either.

If, for some reason, white tried to cut this double hane and black was strong nearby, W would have to face the lost of 1 to 3 stones. Can you read this continuation?

The double hane is best played when if forms a “tiger’s mouth”, because there is a stone defending both cuts at the same time. Then we don’t talk about double hane any more, but about tiger’s mouth.

While double hane is so powerful, it is also very dangerous for the one who uses it, so you need to have read all possible continuations and having a counter-plan for them, before doing such a move.

In this situation the double hane is calling for a cut. White will certainly cut at A or B due to his strength nearby. In fact, even the single hane is a bit of an overplay, because white is able to cut there and black will have left a sacrificed stone which is currently purposeless.

Now let’s talk about a specific double hane we see on beginner’s games.

Double hane at the border

As we’ve all been beginners, we’ve all made this mistake. It is a typical mistake from beginners which we’ve all learned by being punished after doing it. In fact, I’ve recently found myself punishing it a few times on my students till they learn not to make the double hane on the border.

If you still don’t know what I’m talking about, take a look at the picture on the right. If you think black 3 is a correct move, then you need to read this article. If you think black3 is wrong, you’d probably be able to read the appropriate punishment.

Most beginner’s accept this B3 to be a good move, since it blocks white from entering his own territory and makes an atari at the same time. Have I ever talked about how important it is to know when to sacrifice stones? This is a paradigm.

This sequence on the left is the appropiate punishement by white. As you can see, W4 makes an atari, which B defends by killing the stone 2.

White then ataries from black’s territory, so if Black just defends that ataried stone, he will lose the 4 stones. Black’s only chance is to play at A for making a ko and trying to minimize the damage.

In the end, Black has lost 4 stones + 3 points of territory + whatever white takes from his territory. White’s now infiltrated on black’s territory and eye space, so every single stone placed there will mean lots of points lots by black, so W benefits can range from 8 points to killing the whole black group.

Next time black won’t make the double hane, and will play at W4, white will play at B5, black will atari and both will defend.

First of all, the most important: European Go Congress 2008 open for subscription. If you want to join the next EGC, you’ll have to register there as soon as possible for the cheapest fees. This year it’ll take place in Leksand, Sweden, from the 26th July to the 9th August.

If you are interested in professional news, you should know that the second game of the Meijin title has been already played and players are now on a draw. You can see the games and some uncommented variations at “Meijin 2007 – 361points.com”. And based on the first game of this Meijin, Shorin created a very interesting entry on this blog: “Learning from professional games (1)”.

On another level, far away from final games of the Meijin title, but equally interesting for its familiarity with our games, there is a nice post called “Don’t Panic - at Because it’s there”.

On the last pack of recommended articles, I must say that there has been quite a lot of activity at GoDiscussions with some good topics going on.

1. “How’s your intuition?”: A user posts one situation from a professional game and asks player from different categories about their next move. One day is given for each category, so DDK answer first, then SDK and finally dan players. There are three posts of this “collection”: One, Two and Three.
2. “Favorite Pro?“: Some users discuss about their prefered pro player and their abilities.
3. “Studying amateur games“: Discussions about the value of studying amateur games instead of professional ones. Here you’ll find the “pros” and the “cons”.
4. “Ladder breaker: How to respond it?“: Rable shows us a real situation from a recent game and different users discuss about possible responses for a ladder breaker move. This discussion is held at a quite high level.

The day after Sabadell’s Tournament I had to play the 2nd game in the Rioplatense Tournament. It was a game against a 13k KGS with 5 stones of handicap. The time settings were 10 minutes plus 15 minutes for 25 stones of Canadian byo-yomi. As you can see, the time settings don’t allow much time to think in tsumegos or brilliant strategies, so I couldn’t solve this tsumego correctly on the actual game but I managed to win anyway.

As you can see, black is not exactly on a bright position. This situation came after black not finishing the monkey jump sequence which started at A17 and ignoring too the settling move at A15. Black started realising he had to answer my moves after white 199… but it was too late… or not.

Last weekend I took part of the 2nd Sabadell tournament. Sabadell, for those who aren’t from Spain, is a city close to Barcelona, which has it’s own Go club.

It was the first tournament I played on real life and I was quite nervous indeed. It was a handicapped tournament with 25 minutes and 30 seconds of japanese byo-yomi, based on McMahon with 4 rounds and rated for the European Go Federation. As there were few of us (only 14) and the levels ranged from 20k to 3d, there were lots of high handicapped games. It was won by a 4k, who played incredible game against a 2d when both of them had gone undefeated, involving a huge seki on one side of the board.

Winning the first game against calmed me down a little bit. And assuming I would lose the second one, even before playing, allowed me to relax myself even more: playing against a 3d is not an easy game even with 9 stones.

The problems appeared after lunchtime. I had two games against 8k players with 2 stones on my favour. For some reason, I relaxed myself too much and started playing too aggressively, which seems to be a nice idea against weaker players, but it turns out to be a really suicidal technique against stronger ones.

In the end, if we only talk about the results, I got 1 victory and 3 defeats. If we talk about the experience, I’d say I learned a lot, though I think I still have some to digest.

You can see some photos of the event Photos 1 and Photos 2.