I can imagine Fujisawa "The King of Blunders" Shuko reading this, and shaking his head: "Youngsters nowadays... in my time we had really silly ways to lose a title!"

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Sorin - 361points.com

2nd Oza game is live now. Can Iyama put his recent bad results behind him and get back to business as usual of beating up Ichiriki like his 10 wins in a row in the last set of title matches?

Update: Iyama won by resign. I didn't review with LZ yet, but it seemed to me he was always on the front foot from the top left fighting onwards.

Iyama won the 3rd Oza game too fairly convincingly once the big fighting started.

With a seven-stone-long stick on the second line, no less!

Reminiscent of AlphaGo vs Park Junghwan. Interestingly LeelaZero said Ichiriki shouldn't have extended the last time as that allowed black to live in sente (getting the turn in sente as followup is a nice bonus but not worth enough for gote) but played first in the centre, even though he would then have to endure Iyama playing hane up which hurts the liberties of the white wall plus being big for territory. But getting the first move in the balance of power fighting in the centre was more important, and is the kind of think I think bots are very good at judging.

And Iyama won the 3rd Tengen game vs Yamashita to take a 2-1 lead there too.

Why did Yamashita resign? It wasn't at all clear to me that black was doing badly.

Black considered that his M17 group is dead?

That black m17 group would be locally dead had been clear for a while, when he resigned it was clear that all the surrounding white groups were alive and therefore m17 wasn't going to live from winning a semeai on one of them.

Ichiriki beat Iyama in the 4th Oza game by 1.5, in the middlegame FineArt said he had 100% win chance so I think he probably slacked off a bit (why not fight ko at top right?). Deciding 5th game is on 13th December.

My counting is that Ichiriki Ryo has 9 win and 23 loss against Iyama. It's good that he can finally win some winnable games.

Iyama's slumming it back in the Meijin league today, first game against youngster Mutsuura Yuta 7d.

Yamashita beat Iyama in the 4th Tengen game by 2.5 after a nice kill, so Iyama has 2 deciding 5th games coming up: Ichirki in the Oza on 13th and Yamashita for Tengen on the 18th December. So could only have 2 3 of the big 7 titles after that.

Edit:
Kyo Kagen took the Gosei
Cho U took the Meijin
decider vs Ichiriki in Oza
decider vs Yamashita in Tengen
Kisei final vs Yamashita starts in Jan
Honinbo league in progress (Hane and Ichiriki lead 3-0 currently)
Judan at semifinals for challenger (Murakawa, Onishi, Yamashita, Takao)

3

Iyama beat Ichiriki by resignation in the deciding 5th game to keep his Oza title. It was a pretty convincing win, FineArt had Iyama around 90% for most of the game (move 67 to resign over 100 moves later).
- Seems like Ichiriki got into a difficult situation early with his q4 AI-style attachment making a heavy group, FineArt wants to tenuki and LZ prefers simple p4 and it becomes like a large avalanche but with white extend not hane.
- Iyama could (FA suggests) have just answered p7 at q7 and said thanks for the bad exchange, allowing black m8 but I suppose he had the sharp shape attack of o6 and q2 squeeze combo planned. My LZ misjudged the power of that at low playouts.
- Black having to defend at n5 is painful, bots suggest m3 cut first: if white has to answer at o3 that's nice (because it's a probe now and later white can easily sacrifice the 3 stones) but actually it seems white can m2 and the squeeze is still good for white so black would be stuffed.
- Black settling on the outside not bad though (FA 45%)
- But why not black hane at f5? It seems like Ichiriki tricked himself with the j6 k4 attachments as they resulted in getting the m3 cut but that only got 3 now-small stones whilst his corner cried.
- c2 passive, keep fighting on outside and there's not a clean kill and black can make other things more important first.
- By move 70 it's kinda game over, black is just pulling out some heavy stones with white safe on both sides.
- There's some more fighting but it all seems within Iyama's control as he settles both groups at top right, even making nice use of q8 with a little sacrifice.
- Black resigns at 186, either his big heavy group from before gets cut and dies, or to save it white saves his top left, plus the black upper middle doesn't have 2 clear eyes yet either.

Iyama beat Yamashita by resignation to keep the Tengen title.

By defending the Tengen title Iyama's now won 43 editions of the big 7 Japanese titles, surpassing Cho Chikun's record of 42. Cho won 10 Honinbo titles in a row, Iyama's currently on 7, can he match/beat that?


From https://twitter.com/asahi_photo/status/ ... 3219690496

Kisei game 1 vs Yamashita is live now
https://share.yikeweiqi.com/golive/detail/id/14760
A fun attachment (seen in joseki) to end the first day.

Update: Iyama won by resign. LZ thought he was doing well with the top side fighting but then lived too passively and Yamashita took the lead, but then Iyama reversed it with his lower side invasion (Yamashita played too much dame, presumably hoping for a large scale attack but Iyama settled easily).

Kisei game 2 so far to move 54. Interesting fighting and exchange from Yamashita's (white) resistance at e14. I thought it was pretty nice for him to get that huge left side with good aji particularly as he got sente to close at c6 so it's going to be difficult for black to invade/reduce there. LZ agrees and says it was great for white and Iyama shouldn't have so easily given up on d13 and the e12 stones even though he got super thick (or overconentrated and forced?) on the top side. I wonder if there's a nice tewari. Anyway, Yamashita has to settle his top side group now so still plenty of chance to screw up his 86% lead (Elfv1 98%) and for Iyama to show his strength, I added an LZ example of settling, nicely using the aji of the dead white stones.

Yamashita kept on fighting well, here's the game to the end. LZ approved of his r11 q6 combo, though slightly preferred to just spend a move on the top group at k18. The o11 q9 combo is a new joseki from these AI corner attachments and worked particularly well as part of his sabaki. I can't understand Iyama's q13 defence, what was he scared of? (Maybe trying to play in a less forcing way to give white more opportunities to mess up, goading him into overplay?) LZ thinks it halves his winrate (10% to 4%). But then Yamashita didn't make the simple solid connection at o13 (LZ's #1) but s10 to save the r7 cutting stones because he wanted to pull out his o7 to attack n7. That seemed unnecessarily risky to me and could give Iyama some chances to reverse the game but Yamashita handled the fight well and got an easy ko with sequence to m12 (an LZ blindspot, so LZ's preference to sacrifice some stones to solidly save the rest were based on thinking this fighting variation wasn't as good for white as it really was). Iyama resigned soon after when white sealed off his left side after Iyama connected the right side ko. A very nice game from Yamashita.