Mirror ladder

I found this curious problem in a book. Try to figure out if black can capture white in a ladder. Then follow the sequence and check your answer!

Go Comic

In case you were thinking, I didn't mean Cosmic Go.

The empty Triangle is a site containing very nice and fun go comics.

 

 

Voices

 

 

These are my favorites:

• Completely lost again 
• Voices (shown above)
• Playing crisis
• It's byoyomi time 
• The ultimate tsumego 
• Too heavy
• Snowsuji 
• Weakness 
• Rank microcosm 
• Welcome to KGS 

Mottos

Over at Senseis Library is a page full of interesting mottos. Below are the ones I liked most:

"Timidity, foolhardiness, jealousy, inconstancy, impatience.... just as in day to day life, in Go too, these emotions drive the course of encounters between players. Their relative
strengths are insignificant, in comparison." 

Awaji Shuzo

"Whether you win a game or lose it is a matter of fate at the time. What really counts is whether or not you played good moves."

Kajiwara Takeo

"Amateurs' go comes from pleasure, professionals' go comes from suffering."

 Kageyama Toshiro

"You see - I strongly believe that Go is a game of balance, that there are no best moves in the absolute sense, and that for every move you make you incur a certain loss which together with the gain this move brings constitutes the value of the move. In other words - no matter how good your move, it cannot simultaneously do everything you would like to do at the same time, and so certain goals must be sacrificed in order to reach other goals. To be aware of those little sacrifices is, to me, a sign of understanding of the game and maturity of a person as a player. To be able to choose which goals are worth sacrificing is a sign of playing strength." 

Dieter quoting Bantari

"Tactics is knowing what to do when there's something to do. Strategy is knowing what to do when there's nothing to do."

Savielly Tartakover

"Go is all that matters. Well, there are other things in life, but they are gote and worth less than 10 points."

anonym

Kageyama - Take 2

This is the continuation of my previous post on Toshiro Kageyama's book 'Lessons in the fundamentals of Go'.

Golden rules:

• "Do not approach enemy thickness." page 98.
• "Don't use thickness to surround territory." page 98.
• "The enemy's key point is your own." page 169.

Quotes:

"Irresolution is a vice." 

page 19.

 "The most important thing to learn from professionals is not where they play but why they play there." 

page 99.

"Black 1 and 3 are wrong. Do they look natural to you? Then you will
have to reverse your thought processes 180 degrees if you ever want to
play correctly."

page 107.

"In this type of position White cannot afford to let Black approach at
'a'. If it is his turn he has to make the two-space extension to 1.
This is common sense. The player who would not extend to 1 does not exist.

page 109.

"Anyone who leads an abandoned and dissipated life because the end of
the world is near is going to experience his own personal destruction
first. Desperation and despair are to be feared most of all.
To kill or let live. I would like to see this disturbing question confined to the stones on the go board."

page 118.

If anyone is so insensitive as to ignore this difference and play 1
and 3, I am past the point of anger. All I can do is burst out
laughing."

page 145.

"I was filled with sadness at the inability of amateurs to focus their
power in the right direction. I began to realize why the brute-force
school of 'gangster go' prospers so. Those who cannot find the correct
move in not-so-difficult positions like this deserve to be roughed up
a bit. Amateur go seems to be a world where reason retreats in the face of unreason."

page 148.

MWA Go Lessons

I added to the links section, an entry for the Malaysian Weiqi Association Go Lessons blog. It's full of great stuff that I didn't find in books. Unfortunately the last post dates July 2011.

This is a paragraph I found very interesting, the full post can be found here.

In Book 6 of Machiavelli’s ART OF WAR, he said, “Great care is also to be taken not to reduce an enemy to utter despair. Julius Caesar was always very attentive to this point in his wars with the Germans, and used to open a way for them to escape after he began to perceive that, when they were hard pressed and could not run away, they would fight most desperately; he thought it better to pursue them when they fled, than to run the risk of not beating them while they defended themselves with such obstinacy.”

This advice is true and applicable to Go too. When you are attacking your opponent’s stone, if you become unreasonable and attacks too hard, very often you will find a strong resistance and you risk getting captured yourself. It is better to just pursue your opponent’s stone, threatening to capture them but not forcing it too hard, and in the process of pursuing them, obtain advantage such as securing territory or building influence and strength.

Game review

In an earlier post I said that beginners should not resign. The following game is a proof of that statement. By move 60 I was about to resign, but since I'm a beginner playing against another beginner, it's expected that mistakes not only occur at the beginning of the game, but throughout the whole game. It's also important to practice all different aspects of the game: fuseki, middle game, endgame, life & death, etc., even when at disadvantage.

There is almost nothing I am to be proud of in this game, on the contrary, I honestly don't know what I was thinking about when playing my awful moves. Anyhow, the capturing race that took place was quite interesting, and demanded a lot of thought, if only I had used a bit of thought at the beginning, things wouldn't have gotten so hard.

I personally feel more challenged when things get rough, specially at the beginning. And when the game is lost, I grab the opportunity to play more relaxed and try new things out, after all, there is nothing to loose.


This game was my last 2013 game, and I remember it specially because I started 2014 in a very bad way on personal matters, but I know that it will end up great. Hope is the last thing to loose.