Just played an ASR League game where my opponent opened with tengen and double 3-3 as black, and I went with a sanrensei. When I asked about his opening afterwards, he said that Yilun Yang recommended it, and that I had handled it wrong because my sanrensei didn't have room to develop a moyo. I understand the logic, but I was curious about what others here think about playing/countering this sort of opening.

I don't know if Yang recommends it - I've got all his books and he doesn't say anything about it - but I had a game against someone a while back and crushed him. He tried too hard to make a moyo and it was easy to prevent.

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There is only one pro example in the GoGoD database, when it was played against Go Seigen in 1933. Go won. What is characteristic of that game is that (1) Go played nirensei and got two largish corner areas around them - enemy stones too far away to affect them? and (2) Black got small territories around his 3-3 stones but on the rest of the board, while he made several safe groups, none had much more than the bare two eyes. Again, I surmise that Black's initial stones were placed in a way that meant none of his groups could ever work together easily. At any rate, no other pro has deemed this opening worth copying in pro play.

On a separate topic, I noted the "I crushed him" comment and had a wry smile. I thought of the paradigm:

PERCEPTION
Amateur: I crushed him. Pro: I was lucky.

REALITY
Amateur: I was lucky. Pro: I crushed him.

Nothing new in that, of course, but it also brought to mind Yamashita Keigo's recent comment that he was surprised that amateurs remembered the games they won whereas he felt they should remember the games they lost. That in turn got me to musing whether there is rather more in this than a mere joke. Does it signify a profound difference in attitude? After all, we get countless examples here of amateurs asking "how do I punish this mistake", which is something pros very rarely say.

I've long assumed that we amateurs, as regards go development, are to be regarded as children. When we are weak/young we expect beginner/childish mistakes but hope we will grow out of them. Recently, however, I've been leaning towards the conclusion that amateurs, even the best, never grow out of their mistaken attitudes. They will always talk about crushing, punishing, hamete, invading and a quick result. Real pros (not amateurs who reach a pro rank but those who've been groomed as pros) seem, whether they have an aggressive style or a patient one, to prefer talking about things like efficiency, restraint and safe groups (and only then attack). In other words they worry more about their own moves rather than the opponent's. Which brings us back to Yamashita...

Well, attitude aside, don't forget that they can find the answer themselves.

Thanks. I have now re-read this paragraph three times and it makes more sense every time. It is indeed a difference in attitude.

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Well, when I say I crushed the person, it's because he was too wedded to his opening and too focused on what he expected of it. When I flouted his plans, he didn't change and try and adapt to a fluid situation, but kept trying to build up influence based on those three stones.

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When you think about it, our play, especially at my feeble level, is all about mistakes: those that we make, which are exploited by our opponents, and those our opponents make, which we exploit. We don't have the ability yet - at least those who are kyu players - to think about efficiency, restraint, and safe groups. But the reason the pros think this way is _because they know that if they don't they will be punished_. It's foolish to think that pros aren't fully conscious of the consequences of their every move, and know that if they were to play the slack moves that amateurs play, that _they would be punished_. They may not say so, because they know that they simply don't play the same moves.

Do you ever hear of a pro playing an "overplay"? No, it's a "probe" because you know his opponent will know how to respond. While you're right about the terms we use, I think you're mistaken in thinking that the pros aren't aware of the consequences of the type of moves us "children" play; they've just moved beyond those moves.

My guess - though this is just a guess - is that inseis probably play in ways similar to the way amateurs play, with the same concepts and strong competitiveness. I wouldn't be surprised if they use terms like "crush," "overplay," etc.

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This thread confused me at first. Then I realized that the title meant "playing against a pro-recommended opening" and not "playing against a pro, recommended opening".

As far as playing against it is concerned I think you have to understand the meaning of it then the answer will become clear. The two sansan are designed to grab secure territory but the tengen is purely for influence. These two are inconsistent. Black will be unable to use the tengen to for a moyo and so obviously its only purpose is to prevent white from creating one. Once you realize that then the answer becomes clear: do not play a moyo game, which is what sanrensei is. I think a combination of a 4-4 and 4-5 might work well.

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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).

No, that's not it at all. I am talking about pro attitude even when the (future) pro is still of low amateur strength. Also, I'm including in those who have amateur attitudes even pros who've come up as strong amateurs (as opposed to being trained). They probably know more than a few hamete - indeed, that's my point. Yasunaga Hajime was a famous amateur of 4-dan pro strength who could, and did, trap young pros with hametes. But Go Seigen beat him down to a four-stone handicap.

The real point is that you can't just push attitude aside. It is (I postulate) the crucial difference.

If you want another way to look at it, the pro attitude is to say: If all my moves are perfect, I don't need to worry about my opponent's moves. The amateur attitude is to look for imperfections in the opponent's moves and to try to punish them.

Or, the amateur wants to get rich quick, preferably without making any investment. The pro is prepared to invest and live off an annuity.

The amateur, like the American lady who said, "God grant me patience - and I want it NOW", importunes, "Teacher, tell me..." The pro waits and studies until his teacher has something to say.

Or, we may dream of being like the Man who Talked to Goats and having powers to make them explode, but in reality it's best not to show off even in front of goats. As one wise goat gruffly said to the amateur who protested that another goat had just eaten his fancy headgear: "I don't like your hat he chewed."

Nothing wrong with being an amateur, of course, or with wearing something fancy on the head instead of worrying about what's inside the head. It's just that I don't think people have much hope of being a proper pro with amateur attitudes.

Yes, very often. Just a few hours ago I read a comment by Go Seigen that a move by Honinbo Shusai (ok, just a mere Japanese 9-dan, again) was an overplay (when he was ahead, to boot).

I repeat and stress that when I say pro in this context I am not referring to a fully fledged 9-dan, but to pro chicks - the ex ovo stage when getting the right attitude is the key to survival. A chick in a nest that sees a worm on the ground and tumbles down to punish it by eating it is less likely to survive than a chick that lets mum feed it so as to concentrate on building up wing strength and learning to fly well first.

Pros don't just make overplays. They make slack moves and all other kinds of mistakes. Quite a lot in one game. Any commentary will show you that, even for 9-dans. But there are also dozens of games by ex ovo future pros taking large handicaps in their early days. As the commentaries on these show, established pros can see even then that one 6-kyu has the right attitude to be a pro whereas another 6-kyu does not. More specifically, where they differ, I suggest, is in the attitude behind the mistakes. If the youngster is trying to defend when it is time to defend but gets the wrong point, he may be crushed but at least he had the right idea, and is marked down as "promising". If he attacks when he should defend, he still gets crushed but also gets his report card marked, "Suggest he takes up something easier like brain surgery."

There was a good article in Go World about, I think, Kaku Kyushin, when he was very young and was playing his teacher, Tomita Tadao, the author of the article. Tomita said, as I recall, that if his pupil did not play a move in a certain area (whether or not it was on a precise point) he was prepared to send him home at once. (The GoGoD disc tells me it was in Go World 17, 18, 20 or 21 but I'm afraid I'm too lazy to look it up.)

I have been surprised that quite a few amateurs on the forums have bristled when someone (usually me, I know) suggests there may be an attitude problem behind their play, but I don't see why even low kyus can't think about restraint and defence as priorities. For heaven's sake, how many amateurs here cross the road by rushing straight out? 99.9% look first, because we were taught that by pros in the art of life - parents. You might argue that this was ingrained at a young and impressionable age, and that older people find it harder to learn. But I remember when I went to live in France as a student at Strasbourg University. I was used to cars driving on the right side of the road. When I first stepped out of Strasbourg station I was almost run over by cars driving on the wrong side of the road. I was a low-kyu pedestrian in France. I suppose I could have bought a hammer and tried to "punish" all those drivers by smashing their cars, but it seemed more natural to follow the policy of "efficiency, restraint and safe groups (i.e. me)" by learning to look left first instead of right. I had a sore neck for a few days as I belatedly jerked my neck the (for me) other way. But I soon learned.

If people don't want to learn, there's nothing wrong in that for a mere game like go. But surely people asking how to punish something do, ostensibly, want to learn. Is it really the case that these people are all the "if I had a hammer" type and just want to learn to pound away at their opponents? Surely some want to know whether there's another way.

Ok, let's assume that you're right. (And I bow to both your strength and experience.) How does a kyu player like me learn the correct "attitude"? Perhaps there's a book for you to write, John...

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I don't think it's logical at all. The 3-3 is a territorial move, so when you play two 3-3s it is very difficult to utilize the tengen effectively. I think the best way to handle it is to play high like you did, but also prioritize the wedge between the 3-3s to break up the weak moyo that Black is trying to create. Dinerchtein actually covered this opening in a video where he says pretty much the same thing, I'll try to find it if I can.

edit: Video can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ23ajhg0Bo

I'd actually be surprised that Yang would have recommended it, and it's more likely that the player was mistaken and was thinking of Dinerchtein. I've taken lessons with Yang, and his approach is much more classical than Dinerchtein, who's always looking for the unexpected.

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Observing ones own results, i.e. both results of individual fights within a game, and the overall win/lose ratio, might give an idea.

From my recent tournament games, I come to the conclusion that the most dangerous situation for me is when I am way ahead. For a new driver, the most dangerous period is between the moments when he says "OK now I became a good driver" and his first accident.

Last weekend in a tournament game, I had an extremely embarassing loss. I was ahead one million points. I had killed two big (more than 12 stones) groups of my opponent without him getting a proper compensation. After 100 moves or so, I would certainly resign if I was my opponent. But he continued.

I managed to lose that game, the main reason being my wrong attitude. Of course he tried to use the aji of dead stones to grab back at least some of the territory. I would usually allow him to take it because I got something much bigger anyway. But no, I was so overconfident, I said no, you cannot even have that... The result of the fight, he took away the second eye of my surrounding group and we both lived in seki (about 40 points of loss for me, instead of the 5 points I refused to compromise). Ok that was still not too bad, I was still ahead.

What happened then, I got angry and made emotional moves leading to his other "dead" group to kill several of my stones. Consequence: big embarassement and resign.

He was a very nice old guy and sincerely apologized for stealing my game. He was indeed sorry to see my disappointment But after all, go is all about stealing each others (or noones) territory, isn't it?

The game was in my two hands, and slipped away so easily. That was a huge lesson for me about attidue.

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If you say no, Elwood and I will come here for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of the week.

I saw this particular KGS+ lecture, and the player is indeed mistaken.

the double san-san was recommended against the tengen is my memory serves well.

@lindentree: Is your question answered already? I would say, your opponent was correct. With the opponents tengen stone in place, your star point stone in the middle of the side is less efficient, because the tengen stone limits your prospects. This becomes more obvious if you assume some common lines (low approach to the corners, low pincer, taking the corner) where the tengen ends in a perfect place to reduce the moyo and helps further reduction.



Yes, it is all about mistakes. But the question about attitude may be how one can overcome mistakes in the long run. The right idea with bad reading can be corrected by building up reading strength, fundamental misconceptions - like the belief that you can't care for efficiency because you are too weak anyway - will stay without lot of effort to overcome them.

I guess amateur practice leads a lot of players adopting bad attitude for short-term benefits which may damage the growth in the long run. (Never resigning, trying to win lost games, lack of defense, trick plays.) I am pretty weak, but when I assess beginners play (and potential), I also look for humble-looking but efficient moves, good ideas and things like that more than results. It may help to look at one's own games the same way.

I must admit I remember won games better than lost games, though.

I think a much more important distinction than "mistakes" vs. "efficiency" is "your mistakes" vs. "my mistakes".

We have many threads here that ask how to punish some mistake. This is "your mistake" thinking. We (amateurs) see a mistake of the opponent and want to take advantage of it. Ignoring for a moment that often it's not even possible to exploit a mistake, I think this attitude is inefficient and short-sighted in itself. It's basically learning something that won't help you later on, because later on you'll meet stronger player that won't make that kind of mistakes anymore.

In contrast, I think we should think more of "our mistakes", and how to correct them. Just play the best moves and avoid making mistakes yourself. That way, the opponent's mistakes don't really matter anymore. In a won a game, the opponents mistakes are irrelevant. In a lost game, we obviously made more or worse mistakes than the opponent, so we should work on making less mistakes, instead of trying to figure out how to punish the ones of the opponent.

I think that's a question of attitude that has nothing to do with rank or strength. When I play a 9 handicap game against a 15k, I have two ways to win. Either I can try to exploit every mistake I see (typically by reading better and killing some groups). Or I can just try to play good moves, and usually some group will just die naturally. That means you can get from 15k to 4k just by learning to avoid your own mistakes.

To come back to "mistakes" vs. "efficiency": I also think that comes naturally with the "my mistakes" attitude. Because when I look at my own mistakes (leaving aside the stupid blunders where I just misread and lost a group), I tend to think more about those things like "that's inefficient", "my position feels overconcentrated", "I had to run with a weak group", and so on. In contrast, when I look at mistakes of my opponents, I tend to think more in terms like "that's an overplay", with the implicit assumption that I have to "punish it". A more constructive approach would be to just accept the move without judgement, be happy about the suddenly improved position on the board and just play the best move

The problem often seems to be the double misconception: "my opponent deviated from the joseki I know" THUS "my opponent's move is wrong" THUS "I should strike to punish immediately". By replacing the question "how do I punish?" by "how do I avoid getting tricked?" or, even better, "what are the best follow-up moves for both players, and are they worth playing immediately?", one might expect a more reasonable result. Nevertheless, I have the feeling that you exaggerate this point.

For one thing, I think that before one can really understand the value of honte, one must first have a good amount of experience in sharp fighting. There is a very thin line between a honte move and a slack move, and there are moments where one simply has no time to play honte, no matter how solid it might be. I've seen "safe groups and restraint" being misapplied just as often as greedy invasions and unnecessary attempts to kill, and I doubt that anyone here would not agree that blindly defending is just as bad as blindly attacking. But for another, I have not seen any examples of your so-called "amateur attitude" in this thread. How to play against an unusual opening is an interesting and difficult question, independently of attitude. And what is amateurish about crushing an opponent? I've never seen any pro hesitate to crush their opponents when given the opportunity. Of course, there are those among us who fight with sneaky tricks and deliberate overplays, hoping for the opponent to screw up - I noticed that one particular Malkovich player has been extremely successful this way. But you seem to forget that it is entirely possible to crush someone through good, honest moves.

Finally (and forgive me for veering away from the original topic of this thread), I strongly believe that inventiveness is something to be treasured. Whether or not my new "invention" that deviates from joseki, or my strange-looking yet interesting "tesuji" is perfect is something I often do not know - but how would I be able to figure that out and get stronger, if I don't have the guts to try it out? Simply put, I think it's just hard to progress if one only plays standard moves, shallow defenses, and joseki from the book. Haven't a lot of really strong players had reputations of always attacking for the kill and fighting like crazy, before finally figuring out honte and getting from the middle-dan region to high-dan rankings? So, rather than bluntly declaring unusual moves to be "amateurish" or even resulting from "problematic attitudes", I prefer to value them for what they are: necessary steps towards learning the proper move.

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My name is Gijs, from Utrecht, NL.

When in doubt, play the most aggressive move

Yilun Yang may have recommended that your opponent try out the opening based on his particular style of play. Maybe he wanted his student to get some sort of experience.

Also, I don't think it is game losing, but it is true that it's difficult to get a moyo when he's played tengen, so maybe sanrensei isn't ideal.

It's probably best to be patient and play normally. He didn't waste a move by playing tengen, but he also cannot make a good moyo immediately since he's played 3-3. So you can maybe be calm and hope that you can get an advantage from his playing slightly inconsistent moves.

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be immersed

I don't really know. As I said, this is a relatively new shift in my own thinking and I may be way off course (but for whatever experience is worth, my instinct is that I am at least facing in the right direction). Maybe a discussion here will throw up some answers.



The point possibly is exaggerated - perhaps simply through being exposed as a new idea? But rephrasing old ideas as above strikes me as the sort of thing that would make a Zen master hit you with his paddle (or whatever it is they do). Rephrasing is still an attachment to the old way of thinking. Detachment to allow in a new way of thinking is called for. For such a major shift maybe exaggeration is not enough?



I don't think that fighting is the only way to understand honte, and maybe not even the best. That's a bit like saying that a criminal learns to be good if he gets in trouble enough. I think it's more likely that he just learns to pretend to be good. The best way to teach someone to be good may be to teach them from first principles. I think those who are destined to be go pros probably learn about things like honte also from first principles. They learn about fighting from first principles, too. They don't really need one to interfere with the other. The essence of "first principles", I suggest, is learning how to make your own moves efficiently meet the criteria. Learn your scales before you try to play jazz.



That again seems to me simply to be either a statement of the obvious or another restatement of old ideas, but it certainly doesn't seem to be relevant. To be relevant it has to address the question of whether a safe move was played when a safe move was called for, but was just the precise point that was wrong - full marks for style (i.e. attitude), poor marks for technical merit. Or was it played when an attacking move was called for? Poor marks for style, good marks for technical merit.

My still coalescing view is that a senior pro assessing pupils would select those that had good style, reasoning they can be taught technique with enough time. He would, however, tend to reject those with poor style and good technique because his experience would tell him that it is much harder to teach style (again, in the special sense of attitude). As a concrete example of that, I refer you back to a remark by Kobayashi Satoru I quoted recently here where he talked of "professional tactics, amateur hallucinations" in relation to some top amateurs. After all, we don't make a guy professor of mathematics just because he can do Rubik's cube in 12 seconds. Nor would we even make Rubik a professor on the strength of his invention. We expect a professor to have the right approach/attitude/style to the whole subject of maths. I regard the hamete experts and the like as Rubik cube solvers, nothing more.


Interesting and difficult, yes of course. But I don't see how any fruitful consideration can take place independently of attitude. It then seems a reasonable stance to suggest that some attitudes are better than others.


Nothing per se, probably, but that wasn't the point raised. The characteristic identified was amateurs WANTING to crush the opponent. Real pros just want to play the best move. If that involves crushing, so be it, but it's incidental, not the motivating factor.