Firstly the actual game itself went on about a hundred moves longer but The Many faces Of Go program didn't seem to save it any more beyond this point, so that was pretty frustrating!

I've been studying and playing for about 18 months or so, so I still feel more like a beginner than anything. But I did pay attention to "play in the corner, then the side" advice and on creating eyes shapes for my groups to connect to. I also paid attention to hasami.

At this point in the game I started to move out into the center. although I don't know if that was premature.

Also I'm confused about the two stranded white stones in the lower left that appear later on. According to "4 in a row is alive" concept I assume my group (black) in the lower left is alive? The program seemed to change it's mind frequently on whether it was alive or dead.

I started the game.

You can put it inline like this (hit quote to see the code, the link is copied from the attachment link above)

<snip>

Edit: Works fine.

I finally figured out how to do it, I uploaded the file to Gokifu and copied the url. Hope it works now

Let's discuss this. The first point is to realize that a situation might be left unresolved at the moment because more valuable to play the move elsewhere. In other words, it might take one more move to live or one more move to kill (eventually) but at the current stage of the game that group isn't worth two moves. The TIMING of when to resolve something left behind is one of the things you will be learning as you improve. Does THAT explain the program (or a human player) changing mind back and forth? You are asking about the life and death of the lower left corner, but white is after much bigger fish.

OK, now let's look at that corner. If it is black's move, do you see a move that will DEFINITELY make that corner alive? If so, now instead assume it is white's move. Is the corner still alive if white made that move? Four in a row might be alive, but not "bent four in the corner".

You apparently have MFOG 11 available (this is the pre MCTS version, capable of up to about 6 kyu, can be told to "randomize" so won't always make the same move) It has a mode where it will throw life and death problems at you. Have you begun using that?

A few comments on the opening

Thanks, that's actually pretty helpful. I admit that lately I've been focusing on making eyes fairly soon, as there's been many times in past games when I find I've left it too late and I've lost a large group because they got surrounded. I didn't want to suffer that frustration again. Lately I have found to my frustration that White seems to capture large parts of the board soon, so now I know that it's due to me being overly slow and defensive.




Black 11...well I wanted the safety of the edge of the board to make an eye

My move 21 was a sort of macho "none shall pass!" move, but now I know it was not a good idea.