the frig blig

Janice Kim (3P) presented this interesting configuration during one of her recent lectures at last week’s 2011 US Go Congress. According to Kim, most typical go games can be simplified to this basic division of the board into quadrants. She then uses this snapshot of the game to illustrate what happens when one player approaches on the second line towards the opponent’s territory, and the opponent blocks. Repeated four times, the player who initiates the approach moves takes the lead by 4. However, if the opponent does not blindly follow by responding to each move but instead takes a move of his own, the game remains even.

Nice illustration Janice!

My record was 1-2 at last Saturday’s Cherry Blossom Festival Go Tournament in Seattle. Here’s how it went down:

My first round game was against Eric who gave me a 2-stone handicap. The opening was played evenly, no overt mistakes by either side. At the end of the fuseki the board looked like this:

The black stone two spaces to the right of the bottom side star point looks strangely placed.

White invaded the bottom by playing the 3rd line knight’s approach to the black group in the lower left corner. Black attached, and white played a 2-space extension to the right on the 3rd line.

This sequence was played out with a few more moves, after which Black got sente whereupon he invaded White’s upper side. The result of Black’s invasion was a ko.

During the resulting ko fight Black made a threat against the invading white group on the bottom. White ignored it, black captured, and white then managed to save over half of his group by sacrificing 5 stones. This was Black’s fatal mistake since the top ko was worth 2 or 3 times as much as the 5 stones he got in compensation. I should have realized that White could sacrifice those stones and if I had, I would never have played that threat. I had others and White didn’t have so many.

My second round I played White against Aki. He came out of the fuseki with a distinct lead, so I invaded and managed to live, destroying a large portion of his potential territory. Consequently I won.

The third and final round I played Job who gave me two stones. He played aggressively and made a mistake in the opening, allowing me to capture a large group of over a dozen stones on the left side which put me ahead. Later in the middle game however Job started a fight on the bottom, and when I took my eye off the captured group from the opening, White used the fight to spill over into that area and cut off one of my encircling groups. Because it had nowhere to run, and the encircled group had more liberties, White successfully rescued his ‘dead’ group and turned the game around.

This seki showed up during my lunchtime game with JJ today. I can’t recall ever seeing one before which included two points for one side!

I added a link to josekipedia on the blig’s go links page. I discovered this site a few months ago and promptly forgot about it. Very cool wiki for josekis — not only are variations numbered but they’re also color-coded (green=good, red=bad) and displayed on a nice interactive goban. And since it’s a wiki, you can make it better and more comprehensive — hooray!

This was from my game at Lee Anne’s party last night — my third game of 2010. I was white and when the beautiful dumpling was formed in the middle of the board, I just had to photograph it for the hall of shame.

As it turns out, I ended up winning. Warning: don’t try this at home!

PS: happy new year!

I interviewed my friends on camera and edited it into this 7-minute documentary, and uploaded a low-res version to youtube:

Yoshi Sawada (left, translator) & Maeda Ryo (right, 6P) lecturing in the Johnson Center.
Moon over GMU campus.
Richard Dolen (left, translator) & Nakano Yasuhiro (right, 9P) commenting on a live match.
Ming Jiu Jiang (right, 7P) reviews an amateur game.

Sorry, no pictures of Andy Liu.

I hope I can remember some of the useful and insightful analysis, comments and review that whizzed by my brain this week. It was fun but like all good things must come to an end. And what am I talking about? There are lectures and games happening all the time. It’s really a question of being able to work them into my schedule, and diligent enough to put the results into practice.

First day at 25th anniversary US Go Congress in Fairfax VA: I took a ‘bye’ in the first round of the US Open in order to get a full night’s sleep (I woke up my dorm roomie at 3:30 a.m. after a 4-hour delay on my United airlines flight from Seattle to Dulles). Got registered, oriented, saw fellow northwestern go players Bill Chiles, Lee-Anne Bowie, George Schmitten and Gordon Castanza.

I played my first friendly game against Francis Rhoades, a 4D from London. It’s his 8th US Go Congress which makes my 5 lame in comparison, especially considering that I’ve never attended a European Go Congress. Hope to change that eventually. Rhoades won after I played a cothreat which turned out to be non-threatening. I had a nice board position in the middle game, until I misread the cothreat and resigned. That’s why they call them dan players.

I signed up to record the first round of tonight’s Ing Masters tournament at 6:15. The staff person peppered me with questions until I told him I wanted to be a recorder because my friend Josh did it last year and spoke highly of the experience. “Josh was great,” the staff person said, immediately smiling and signed me right up.

Returning to my dorm room to shave and pick up my laptop I was greeted with an overpowering aroma of dirty socks — yuck! The window doesn’t open — yikes! Cranked the AC & propped the door open w my laptop case.

Recording the Ing game was very interesting. I ended up on table 6, broadcasting Jie Li 9d and Yang Xu 5d to KGS. Jie Li drew white and maintained a small lead at the start, established a bigger lead in the middle, and during the yose decided to kill one of his opponent’s big groups, forcing black’s resignation.

Not only does Vietnam have insane traffic, tropical heat, bustling river commerce, two-dong scam artists, and fruits from another galaxy, but it also has go players!

Ogura Koen graciously agreed to meet me at his house and did me the honor of asking for a second game after winning our first.

Upon my arrival he asked “What dan are you?” — I replied “Zero dan” which cracked up Sensei and his wife. He gave me a five-stone handicap and let me establish a small lead before killing one of my groups, prompting my resignation.

Sensei offered good-natured analysis of my mistakes after both games — an invaluable lesson. I recorded our first game for future study.

OK, time for a siesta and then dinner.

If this post’s title doesn’t make sense to you, you are free to leave now. American go players, however, should be familiar with the phrase as the generic proverb on judging how far to extend from one’s stones — e.g. if you have a 2 stone wall, you should extend 3 spaces across etc.

During last night’s kyu klass at the Seattle Go Center, Jon Boley shocked this student by stating that the “proverb” is wrong. In a sample fuseki Jon demonstrated how a four-space extension from a three-stone wall on the third line was open to invasion, making the wall heavy. In that case the correct extension is three spaces.

After I got home and the shock wore off, I realized that I missed the opportunity to ask Jon if this was just an exception to the rule, or if the rule is wrong so frequently that it should be completely discarded. It still seems to make sense in many situations, but now that it’s been shown to be faulty I’ll certainly think twice before automatically calculating the length of future extensions.

Per the old Firesign Theater, everything you know is wrong.