Life In 19x19

@Knotwilg: thank you for your comments. Your alternative for I did consider but I didn't imagine your follow-up.

Hi dr,

Do you see any other local candidate ?

Well, you made me spend another half an hour looking now and I am sincerely thankful for the prodding. There are some possibilities attaching at 'a' (C10) that are beyond my level to read out in my head and 'b' (B4) reduces more in gote than the game ...

EdLee wrote:Hi dr,

did you consider any other local moves ?

Well, I considered some less effective moves, but now I see that simply connecting at d5 is at least sente. I could have spent a little more time at this spot.

A new game, my first in many months. I am so rusty. Only 101 moves. I have commented points where I have questions.

(;CA[Windows-1252]SZ[19]AP[MultiGo:4.4.4]PB[Black]BR[6K]PW[dumbrope]WR[6K]KM[6.5]
RE[B+R]MULTIGOGM[1]
;B[dp];W[pp];B[dd];W[pd];B[nq];W[qn];B[pr];W[fq];B[fp]LB[hq:A][cn:B]C[Have ...

...I would like to experiment with other openings, maybe 5-4 and 3-5 and tengen, but there aren't many good resources for studying these openings except maybe an addendum in a joseki book and a few odd pro games, and generally these openings don't mesh well with the traditional handicap ranking ...

$$B
$$ ---------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . O . X . . . . , . . . . . X . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . 1 ...

His weird move does you very little harm. I'd treat the approach stone as a kikashi which happened to induce an inferior response. Then I would tenuki.

However, if you do want to play in the corner, then the best way to do so is probably to observe that he is too low and to get outside influence ...

This is the first game I've played in a while (months?). Mostly I'm interested in how to handle white's odd descent to the second line in the early opening and some of the early fighting. I added some of my thinking in key stages so that reviewers here can tell me if I'm thinking wrong, but I think ...

Reset. I totally failed. Trying again.

These discussions are great. I love it when high dans argue about things and even professionals disagree. That means I don't feel obligated to understand those things in order to get to 1 dan.

If a 1 dan can half-understand the fundamentals, awesome. Honte is rapidly showing up as something I don't ...

Some slow moves in this game, too, and some careless misreads. Also, what's the status of white's group if black plays B18 at the end?

$$B Status?
$$ ---------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . O O X X . . X O O O O O . . . |
$$ | . 1 . O O X . . . . X X X X O O O . . |
$$ | . . . O X X ...

A few comments on the 1st game. I'm sure stronger players can find improvements to / flaws in in my specific suggestions, but here are some things I noticed.

1. Don't strike through knight's move if ladder is broken.

2. Work a little on direction of play in opening, big points. In general, low ...

It's hard to start up again. Congratulations. I think you had an easy win in this game.

(;FF[4]GM[1]SZ[19]CA[Windows-1252]AP[SGFC:1.16]

GN[palmetto-kakoma33(B) IGS]
EV[Internet Go Server game: palmetto vs kakoma33]
PB[kakoma33]
BR[15k]
PW[palmetto]
WR[15k+]
KM[0.5]
DT[2013-10-07]
PC ...

Is Basics of Go Strategy still in basically a joseki format? I didn't mind the Japanese but I thought the original was a little light on, well, strategic concepts. Here we have an enclosure-probe joseki, here we have joseki that starts from a kikashi, etc. etc.

I would say most of the examples ...

Bantari and EdLee:

You both seem to believe the existence and ill effect of bad habits. You're not the only ones. Is the list of bad habits very long? Are they hard to get rid of? If so, why?

I can think of some:


⋅ Optimistic reading (not thinking from opponent's point of view)
&sdot ...