Take a look at this section of the board: White to move.

As you’ll see, this required multiple eye-stealing tesujis on a row and sacrificing a kamikaze stone at S18. So black ends up dead. It’s not very difficult to read right now, after all the tesujis have been played and you have way more than 10 seconds. Would you be able to set this up so that it works with 10 seconds per move? I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t place K19 and R18 with the right timing.

After all, stone placing in Go has a lot to do with timing. And when real timing comes into action I must tell you it was black turn to play. Can black escape? You’ve got ten seconds. Play or give up some stones? What would you choose?  Actually, they still had one extra byo-yomi period, so I’ll give you another extra 10 seconds.

The real black player couldn’t solve it during the game. After a minute, I was convinced that black would die anyway and I was obviously wrong. It wasn’t till I replayed it on a board that I realised my mistake. Black could have survived.

Not only survived. Let’s take a look at the whole board:

As you can see there is a white group floating right in the middle of the board. Actually, during the real game, chasing the upper black group only started as a response to black’s attack to H12 group.

So, now, make your move as Black on the board above. You have the real game and the solution in the game below:

[Embedded SGF File]

Related posts:

1. KGS 5d vs 4d: Tesuji trainning

Assuming I’d spend some long hours at the airports and over a dozen of hours in planes, taking a go book along with me seemed like a good idea. And it soon proved me right. Straight from the beginning I was surprised by another wonderful introduction to some Go concepts and some very basic strategic guidelines. Remembering of Tesuji, I can recall having read an interesting explanation on how to read as an introduction. Tesuji isn’t intended for dan players, but more for the DDK and SDK. However, its introduction is just perfect when trying to explain how the mental process of reading works for newcomers.

In spite of reading the whole book, I would suggest beginners to read just the introduction of these books. And I’m sure there must be some other good newbie focused material around. Since I can’t actually buy all the books around just for the introduction, these introductions just brought to my mind the existence of a internet file with some tenths of go books I wrote about long time ago, the Go Education Collection.

The introduction of Five Hundred and One Opening Problems has two parts:

Concepts: it defines and gives one or two samples of the following concepts: aji, atari, gote, hane, miai, moyo, sabaki, light, heavy, sente, tesuji, thick and thin. This section appears in every book from the “Mastering the basics” collection.

Strategic considerations during fuseki. The part I like the most… and my pupils hate the most, since I say it a few times while reviewing their games:

• Is there an urgent move?
• One that makes a base for your stones.
• One that takes away the base of your opponent’s stones.
• One that takes the initiative in a certain area
• Is there a big move?
• One that extends from your own position
• One that prevents an extesnsion by your opponent.
• One that threatens an invasion.
• One that prevents an invasion
• Is there a big moyo?
• Do you need to expand or close off your moyo?
• Do you need to erase or invade your opponent’s moyo?

If you want to go for a newbie-focused book, I might go for the “A complete introduction to the game” by Cho Chi Kun, who starts from the very basic go rules to somewhat harder tesujis and strategic concepts by the end of the book. Obviously, reading this book needs to be accompanied by some games, otherwise it’s useless. By the way, thank you Matrod for letting me know about this book.

Would anyone want to comment any book?

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1. Discovering Go Books – Elementary Go Series: Tesuji
2. Go Education Collection

As you can see from the image below, right at the beginning of the middle game, they both had a floating group, marked with triangle for black and circle for white; moreover, the latter has two unconnected cutting stones. From this image you can already theorise the nature of this game will be involved with fighting, right?

A few moves later, the next situation showed up:

As a you can see, white is trying to close black and kill him, and thus, the played this hane in J14. Unfortunately for white, he has many weaknesses and cutting points around so this wasn’t the best option. On the other hand, if white hadn’t played this capping move and he had played J13, for example, black would still have tried to struggle for life escaping through the J14 gap. If you already imagine what happened, you may want to skip these lines, but once you’ve reached this point and realised white has to sacrifice one side, which one would you retain?  You can choose between the upper one, which gives you quite a a moyo on the upper side of the board since we are talking about pressing on the fifth line. But then black would have a strong group on the centre of the board from K7 to K 14 and would have certain advantage in future fights. If you decide to sacrifice the upper side, you are giving out a lot of points by saving the K13 stones, but you may be able to keep some pressure on the K7 group.

Sometimes, while watching a game on KGS, you find a game filled with the traditional tsumegos you’ve repeated once and again in Goproblems.com. Here is one of these samples, where you’ll find some problems for double-digit kyus, some that I didn’t manage to solve in real time and some I wouldn’t have solved with a decent amount of time. This game was played on KGS, between Naomichan and Howzulee, white and black respectively, being both 6 dans according to the KGS rating system. You’ll have the whole game loaded in Eidogo by the end of the post, but I’d like to put some pictures of the game.

As you can see from the image below, right at the beginning of the middle game, they both had a floating group, marked with triangle for black and circle for white; moreover, the latter has two unconnected cutting stones. From this image you can already theorise the nature of this game will be involved with fighting, right?

A few moves later, the next situation showed up:

As a you can see, white is trying to close black and kill him, and thus, the played this hane in J14. Unfortunately for white, he has many weaknesses and cutting points around so this wasn’t the best option. On the other hand, if white hadn’t played this capping move and he had played J13, for example, black would still have tried to struggle for life escaping through the J14 gap. If you already imagine what happened, you may want to skip these lines, but once you’ve reached this point and realised white has to sacrifice one side, which one would you retain?  You can choose between the upper one, which gives you quite a a moyo on the upper side of the board since we are talking about pressing on the fifth line. But then black would have a strong group on the centre of the board from K7 to K 14 and would have certain advantage in future fights. If you decide to sacrifice the upper side, you are giving out a lot of points by saving the K13 stones, but you may be able to keep some pressure on the K7 group.

On this image you’ll see what a 6 dan player thinks of this situation: give up the upper side and gain strength to attack the central black group, the shape of white around the J13 stone is quite strong but could be improved using some sort of net-like move,  H12 or H11 for a lighter connection. But I can’t say I would taken the same path. You can zoom in the image to take a deeper look.

So now black floating group from the upper side has been settled down, but he has a floating group right in the middle, with another couple of white stones cutting at K5. White, on his turn, has two groups of cuttings stones, one around K13 and the previously mentioned around K5. But there is something I’m missing in my description of the board: the aji of R7.

We’ve already talked about the relevance of aji and how to exploit it, but there is nothing better than watching an aji being used by dan players.

An aji which was removed and played a few moves later on, giving as a result the situation replayed on the right side of these lines. As you can see, white has pushed through R11 and black has defended the S11 stones by pushing white from below, expecting white to hit against an unbreakable wall: R8.
Due to the time settings, black wasn’t able to read what was going to happen within the next moves when he played S9. Can you spot the tesuji that white used? In fact, it’s very easy once you’ve spotted it, but I wonder what would happen if you encounter this situation on your blitz games, with just a few seconds per move and your opponent’s last moves have just been “pushing the borders” – style.

Well, all in all, taking into account the last events, I’d like to take a glance at the whole board, just to figure out how the game is developing. This is what we find:

Well, black settled in the upper and lower sides. White has the right side. White’s move 116 is a declaration of war against the central black group. Black happens to lengthen his agony by struggling through the G8 area, shortly before being cut by white, who is then cut by black elsewhere. Whatever, after a series of mutual I’ll-kill-you-before-you-kill-me moves which I can hardly follow, the board appears to be a complete mess:

Black is being encircled and he lacks of eyespace. The only remaining option, as seen in “Attack is the best form of defense“, is to kill the central white group around J 10. White tries to escape through the upper side of the board with move 150. But there is a tesuji which will make white stones die in vain, can you read it? It’s another sample of the inconvenience of playing empty triangles. So, it seems like the easy way to escape didn’t work out, lets look for the hard one.

This sequence, I must admit, is totally beyond my reading ability right now, I could have spend a dozen minutes looking at it and still wouldn’t get it. But it’s possible: white escaped through the lower side. On the thumbnail by the side, you have the answer to this tsumego, the hardest one of the day.

The cross marked stone was sacrificed as move 156, the starting move of the sequence and was captured with move 161.

Finally, while playing the yose, players tend to follow each others move when it’s sente. But there was a point where white didn’t play the expected move or, at least, the one I expected.

Which is the correct answer for black 257?

Ok, then, here I leave you with the full game, loaded into Eidogo. Enjoy it, and, please, comment on the post!!

Related posts:

1. Tsumegos and my reading (in)ability
2. KGS 5d vs 4d: Tesuji trainning
3. Real life tsumego

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

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1. Introductory books’ introductions