Bill Spight wrote:
Second, "similar positions" is a vague phrase. Look again at Uberdude's analysis. He started by identifying connected groups of stones. Then he counted their dame. Then he highlighted cutting points. You could have a "similar position" where Black had no cutting points, and then White might indeed be dead. Even if the White group captured the two Black stones in the middle, that might give him only one eye .
Yes, similar is hard to define.
If anyone else reading this has similar judgement issues: by accident I saw a recent lecture by Nick Sibicky (#340) where he discusses situations where one player has a group completely surrounded by opponent's stones. In his example white had six liberties left - not unlike what my opponent had in my game. He says something blatantly obvious, but insightful about it:
the group is not dead as long as any attaching group has fewer liberties. Then he shows how he uses this in one of his games, cutting the opponent's surrounding stones and chasing the fragments - all the time keeping at least one of them short on libs - and eventually surviving this way.
Anyway, I am going back to my Wilcox, and taking his rules a little more literally than I have before. Catch of playing on Tygem to learn to fight, is that one picks up bad habits.
@ez4u:
Thank you for the computer evaluations. While they can give some help to the situations in my horrible game, it can still be hard to find out when a single stone is worth saving (and worth the moves to capture).
Like Bill in his SDK days, I also wonder about pros tenuki-ing in the middle of sequences - and why not at some other times. While I can learn when it can be done, it is different fom understanding why and how to handle opponents trying to pounce on that.