Alejo's Tenuki

Recently I decided to buy a new pendrive to carry job stuff more easily. But, since there was a special price for a 2 Gb Kingston unit, there is plenty of space for other things and, of course, for Go.

My super-mobile study equipment is formed by:
-Gnugo 3.6
-Ggo,
on a simple java version on a single file, which performs nicely all the basic desirably features. It doesn’t need to be installed and can run directly from the external unit.
-Bruce Wilcox Go dojo.
-Books (not gonna tell you which ones).
-My games.
-A couple of hundreds of games from go teaching ladder.

I’m thinking of adding kombilo… but I don’t know on which computers I’ll find myself and I don’t really know if it can be played directly from the external unit.

The only requirements here are: java, windows system (or wine installed on unix systems) and acrobat reader (just for the books).

Kisei 2007: 4th game

On 22nd February started the game, there is a nice battle going on the middle of the board. It’ll continue tomorrow.
Check it on: Kisei 2007 – 361points

Due to the commentaries on this game I read at GoDiscussions, I decided to purchase it just before leaving to London.

I’m not going to make a review of it since it isn’t freely distributed.

I just finished a game against a 10k and I won, so it seems that my strength hasn’t lowered too much during my holidays.

Blog’s speed

I’ve been analysing my blog through some websites, and I’ve found that it takes around one minute to load on a 56k connections. The consecuence of this is that the page fails to load. From now on, I’ll try to use smaller images, with low quality and see if I can make it a little bit more comfortable for users without broad-band internet connection.
The number of posts of the homepage of the site has also been reduced from 10 to 4. The archive has been enabled in order to keep it easy to find the articles on the site.

Q: How many 30-kyus does it take to change a light bulb?
A: They can’t do it, because they don’t see the ladder.

Q: How many 2-dans does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Their positions are so light, that they don’t need light bulbs.

Q: How many 9-dans does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Their positions are so influential that other people change the bulbs for them

Last friday was a profitable intensive Go session: once again, after black ignoring my double-side approach to his 4-4 stone, I was given a familiar situation while playing as white..

There was something pumping in my head: … this 6 space on the corner… he has to make two eyes… hey… that’s familiar… I’ve seen this somewhere else… where?… there was something wrong with it…

… Black dies!!! The L shape dies!!!!

So you can guess the continuation. As you can see, this is a sort of L shape on the corner, and, by definition, the L shape is dead. There isn’t a way to save it if white player plays properly. Here I let you try, there are only some black moves added and their respective white answers, in all cases black dies.
If it stops on "loading" it’s because of the hosting service

These are some of the basic shapes which players have to learn to recognise, you’ll find a deeper study and other shapes on the respective Sensei’s section: Life and Death on Corner shapes. They appear from time to time on games, so it’s better to recognise them and know the continuations to avoid what happened to me: I lost a couple of minutes reading the problem and re-reading it just-in-case I was mistaken.

Heading to London

On Wednesday 14th and for the first time in my life, I’ll take a plane to London. I always wanted to go to England’s main city, visit the British museum, lose myself in the Soho streets, Camdentown’s market, speak with English-natives…
Where do you recommend me to go, related to Go? Go clubs?

Meanwhile don’t expect me to post here, I hope you understand it, but I’ll leave
the comments "open" for anyone, so that you can post what you want. I’ll delete what I dislike when I come back (spam and such things).

The comeback will be on Sunday evening, wait for my return!!

This friday a friend of mine came home and we spent the whole afternoon playing go, we used and abused of the clock, we killed groups, saved quot;unsaveable" groups and laughed a lot. But, above all, I put into the real world the concept of "vital point" and its value.

On the first game we played there was a situation like the following: Where is the vital point of this formation? what would you do as the black player?

My friend decided to go for the margin of the board, to expand himself a little bit assuming that his group would live. I had to chase him and finally stopped him from making more eyespace. He made a monkey jump elsewhere on the board, but he didn’t fill the of this group. A monkey jump is up to 10 points, killing a group like this is much more valuable, so where is the vital point?

A vital point is a place to put the stone that makes you live unconditionally, it automatically creates two eyes and the group lives. Otherwise, if your enemy plays
there, your group dies.

So here is the vital point:

For
those who solved it and know the reason, the following explanation might be useless. There is another "problem" at the bottom of this post.

Why is that the vital point? Because it stops black from creating two eyes. There are some patterns you should see as soon as possible, as well as
their vital points (they tend to be life-or-death problems, which can turn into win-or-lose). They are really worth it because they appear frequently on games and the one who finds it first will play it.

There are several patterns you’ll find, like the L formation and so on (I’ll make a post about that someday) but the easiest ones are these where you have to check the "eyespace shape" to see if it fits on one of these know patterns.

As you can see on the adjacent image, this are the forms you have to be familiar with, and their respective vital point.

How do I kill if I placed on the vital point?
You need to surround the enemy group, and once it’s surrounded, start filling the eyespace with your stones in such a way that it always leads to one of the mentioned forms.
Once the enemy kills your stones (the ones inside his eyespace) play on the new vital point, re-fill and once he kills you, place on vital point… his eyespace will reduce to a 2 space eye, which you can kill with a snap-back.