Double purpose: make territory while attacking

alejo — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 16:43:00 +0000

We all have heard something like: “try doing double purpose moves”. And, sometimes, we wonder how to do it. Dual purpose moves are made in such a way that they achieve 2 purposes (obviously), the most obvious one is to make territory or strengthen yourself while attacking a weak group from the opponent.

Yesterday I saw an interesting game on KGS between a 10k and a 11k, there was an interesting fighting early in the game which went to the centre and involved one big group of each player.
All of a sudden, when the black player realises that his E9 group is alive, he decides to play from the other side. This is the result, starting at move 71:

As you can see, black managed to build a nice wall on the N column just by attacking and trying to close white. The marked wall is incredibly valuable in terms of points, though it doesn’t turn everything into territory (invasion around R5 is still possible) it makes a huge influence on the marked spots.

And, minutes later black player did almost the same on the upper left corner:

As you can see, white started on R14, black pincered, white went for the corner and the following movements are more-or-less traditional response for 3-3 invasion. So, as a result, black got another wall facing his moyo (huge now) which works perfectly with his R12 stone.

If you haven’t yet checked, try invading black’s moyo. There isn’t any obvious available invading point, as they both defended for invasions on E17 (first white) and R5 (then Black), which surprised me quite considerably, because I expected white to invade on R5 before letting black defend.

There are mistakes from both players (some of them are big ones), so don’t study it, but I wanted to show you this nice sample of “dual purpose” moves.

[Embedded SGF File]

Alejo's Tenuki » double purpose

Double purpose: make territory while attacking