If you played on the central point as white for your first move, would that be giving your opponent an instant advantage

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May I ask why you want to know,
and whether you have your own guesses one way or another ?

I have a 100% winning score with a white tengen in tournaments...

Cheers,
Vesa

100%?

People need to shape up ... something like 60% would be great already, but 100%? Seriously, it's not the perfect move. Especially in a competitive setting people should be ready to accept whatever curveballs you throw them.

Cannot be 60% if he has only done it once.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

Oh, low sample size, huh?

The sample is six games during 2001-2003, plus one kuskus tengen (white 2 in 9-10) game.

Cheers,
Vesa

Looks fun:

I like to fool around a bit in fooseki. Thought I'd ask the local wizards their opinion about this opening

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It's an interesting way to play. White has 1 corner to 3, but he seizes the initiative to approach first. He can also tenuki his approaches more easily, since there's support above, and so get stones into a couple of blacks corners.

However, white tengen for the first move feels premature to me. Unless you're worried about black taking it, it seems every so slightly better to wait until your 2nd (or even 3rd, making an approach to a black corner for move 2) move. Make black choose his arrangement of corner stones before knowing that white is going to take tengen. I doubt it matters in practice, but that just seems more 'correct style' to me.

Sometimes I think the chance to play on TV bring out the more interesting moves. There was also the 5-5, tengen, 5-5 game.

Black tengen however could be a good move.

It is not worse than passing.

Same here, 3 games. The last opponent told me that he isn't going to enjoy playing a drunk person.

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This is actually a great metric to use as a starting point.....I think we'll all agree that white playing tengen is significantly better than passing.

If we assume that komi of 6.5-7.5 is reasonable, then the value of the first couple moves in the opening is about 13-15 points. If passing loses you 13-15 points, then realistically the worst case for tengen is going to be about half that (losing you 6.5 - 7.5 points). That means that if you are playing tengen as your first move as white, you shouldn't worry any more about it than you would making a mistake in early endgame (and that is if you are an extreme pessimist, it's entirely possible that it is costing you much less than that, if anything at all).

For me personally, I would spend more time worrying about correctly timing my first line hanes in endgame (which are often double sente!) than I would about the fact that I played tengen in the opening.

Surely its value as the "perfect" ladder breaker alone is worth something.

I think it's completely playable, but primarily if you like fighting. In a cash game, tengen's value would be dubious.

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- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders