Life In 19x19

Here's the game record. I added a few moves at the end to show that even if Ichiriki dies on the left he's miles ahead if he lives on top as compensation.

Iyama losing to takao and ichiriki ryo is like park losing to peng quan and fan yunruo. Hopefully he doesn't go on a slump like park is.

Iyama vs Yo Seiki in 3rd Oza game now.

update: Iyama won so defends his Oza title.

The game ended a bit suddenly. Didn't Yu make a fatal L&D mistake on the group on the left by tenuki, or he was already far behind at the moment, and just tried to find a good place to resign?

Quite an easy game for Iyama. It seems to me that he didn't play many brilliant moves, thought the way he explored the aji on the upper right is quite impressive.

Iyama won game 3 of the Tengen against Ichiriki today. He made a big side which Ichiriki then sort-of lived inside, approach a corner, and Ichiriki added a move allowing double approach. Later Iyama played some rather complicated sabaki and dotting stones around Ichiriki's moyo, letting his corner die in the process but then piecing bits of aji together and winning by resign when some zombies came back to life.

For the W group on the right side, it seems that if B continues to play (instead of the approach on the left), he would be able to keep W group not alive, but perhaps Iyama judged that his outside influence is not strong enough no launch the attack. M9 is to me a move to break W's moyo, rather than to build such a large right side, because W will be able to invade anyway.

The upper left sabaki is indeed impressive. When watching the F18 move, I thought that the game was already hopeless for Iyama, as the best he can do is to live in a small corner. Later, I thought that Ichikiri made an "amateur-like" mistake by playing the hane at 129, instead of connecting his atari stone at G16. But at a closer look, I then realized that B can do E14 and F14 to increase his liberty, and thus connecting underneath. Perhaps it would be unbearable for W, so Ichikiri just played the hane to find a good place to resign.

Game 4 of the Tengen vs Ichiriki today. Some interesting fighting: Iyama gave a centre ponnuki as Ichiriki played lossy ko threats and now he's trying to kill it .

Edit: And succeeded so won by resign, thus defending his Tengen title 3-1.

Iyama lost the first game of the Kisei title match against Kono Rin today.

I feel like most Iyama Yuta's opponents are Kono Rin, Ichiriki Ryo, or Takao Shinji.

Don't forget Yamashita Keigo. He and Takao were the main two challengers for the big 3 (Kisei, Meijin, Honinbo) the last few years.

yamashita not any more

The 40th Kisei (which ended in early 2016) featured Yamashita challenging Iyama for the third straight year.

And that was the last time they played in one of the big tournaments. A couple years ago they used to play much more often.

I feel like most Iyama Yuta's opponents are Kono Rin, Ichiriki Ryo, or Takao Shinji.

Pretty good intuition. In the 2010s Iyama has played about 430 games of which 54 were against Yamashita, 48 against Takao and 32 against Kono. Only 8 were against Ichiriki but they were all recent as he's still a newcomer.

That's a full third of all his games. You'd think he'd welcome a change of scenery with a few more overseas trips

Ohashi Hirofumi 6p posted about the Kisei game and a bad-style bumping into head of 2 stones move that Kono played which Master/AlphaGo also played vs Gu Li: http://blog.goo.ne.jp/minamijyuujisei_1 ... fdb16bba01. Here's the game: