Life In 19x19

oren wrote:If you make a safe group safer, you will fall behind moves in a game.

I think this is plain wrong. (Kind of depends on your definition of "safe", though.) "Being safe" is obviously a very dynamic concept.
You don't just want to live with 2 eyes, you want to make territory, or maybe attack, or reduce with your groups.

Just look at a lot of simple josekis. Standard 3-3 invasion under hoshi pushes from behind on the second line twice. Why? Because we don't want our opponent turning to be sente against our corner.

Or the 3-4 high approach, attach under, hane, pull back, connect, protect with a one space jump (I hope people get which joseki I mean). The one space jump is totally not needed in terms of "safety", but it'll be horrible to allow our opponent to press us down to the second line while he'll get influence.


Or 3-3 invasion under hoshi after being pincered. It ends up with the invader jumping out. Why? Because we're not stupid and don't want to be confined. We're totally alive without that jump, but our opponent would get to surround us in sente (!) and gain a superior position if we didn't jump out.


There are times when we need to leave shaky groups and take some big point, mostly when we're behind on points and said group does nothing but reduce by virtue of being somehow alive anyway.
But saying "defending" equals slack play sounds like bad advice, imho.

Ok, I think I'll stop here, since no one is reading the original post.

I said earlier that you have to read what forcing moves are given to the opponent in a position you play away from. Defending for the sake of only defending is generally not going to help and is not something I would advise to players.

oren wrote:Ok, I think I'll stop here, since no one is reading the original post.

Your original post was responding to someone saying in a nutshell "if your groups keep dying maybe you should spent a gote move once in a while defending them".
If you say one should even secure groups to the point of the opponent not having any forcing moves (which you didn't, btw. Still your definition of "safety" is lacking) then I don't understand your problem with Thunkd's original advice.

oren wrote:How do you plan to be dan-level if you don't make dan level moves?

It goes further than that. I was a lecture and a 3-dan showed his game to pro. It was just in the opening and the 3-dan played a wedge into the opponent's side rather than approach a 3-4 point.

The pro stopped him there and asked how strong he was and he said 3-dan. Then the pro said, "this is a good move if you want to be 3-dan the rest of your life." Then he mentioned he know one pro who liked to do that wedge, just to point out that it's wasn't necessarily bad in terms of winning or losing, but he still insisted that it wasn't the kind of thing you start with if you want to get stronger.

I can see both sides of this. I don't think it's necessary to always play the 100% most severe move. At the same time, slackness can be a hard habit to shake because it is self-punishing and the consequences are much more subtle. Overplay at least sometimes gets punished in a clear way so you can learn.

moyoaji wrote:At move 76 I made a gote move to strengthen my group on the bottom because it had no base. Did I "need" to do it? No.

Uh, is not pure gote. See that enclosure black probably thinks is territory?

Subotai wrote:Do you find that most of your games are decided by the life or death of one large group?

I find this to be the case in the majority of my games.

Any thoughts on what this means?

- It may be the result of too much commitment to killing. All-or-nothing attack is like playing out a ladder without knowing if it's going to work or not in the end. You can recognize good attack by asking this question: would you be satisfied with the move if your opponent lives? If yes, then the attack is effective and if not, then the attack is unreasonable.

snorri wrote:Uh, is not pure gote. See that enclosure black probably thinks is territory?

Well, the move was mostly gote. Yes, it threatens his enclosure a bit, but I can't kill it. The enclosure is quite upset, but it isn't dying.

Gote and sente are incredibly subjective. For example: is an enclosure always gote, or can it be sente?


Some would say "An enclosure is always gote." However, some of these threaten good follow up moves that white may want to respond to.

Really good players are able to make sente moves that do what would otherwise take a gote move. Shusaku had several of these in the ear-reddening game. However, the most famous move in all of go history is pretty much gote...

oren wrote:

Thunkd wrote:If the life and death that decides the game is usually one of your groups, then I'd suggest that maybe you need to make moves that make your groups safer.

This is advice I really don't like to see. You need to read if the group needs to be safer and what forcing moves are given to an opponent. If you make a safe group safer, you will fall behind moves in a game.

If he is losing games on a regular basis because a large group of his dies, then there is a problem he needs to address with those groups. How is a large group that dies a "safe group" that does not need to be safer?

I believe that I mentioned in my post that it is important to know when a group needs help or when you can play away. If you somehow construed my post as meaning that you shouldn't read the position or that you should make a safe move when it is not needed, then you've misread it.

I do not believe that giving the advice "maybe make your group safer" to someone who has large groups die is inappropriate.

Thunkd wrote:I do not believe that giving the advice "maybe make your group safer" to someone who has large groups die is inappropriate.

If you interpret this in the narrow way - "Don't let your groups die if you can play a move so that they live" - then of course the advice is appropriate. The key question is, when is the right time to play that move? If I heard, "Play a move to make your groups safe," I assume you mean: "... before they come under attack in the first place." But it's hard to know whether that is actually good advice in Subotai's games.

Without going into the minutia of when it's a good idea to defend and when to call your opponent's bluff, let's just say that if Subotai is playing a tight middle game and then flubbing the L&D at the end, "play a slack middle game" is not winning advice. Even if we rationalize it by saying, "Well, L&D is his weakness, so he should avoid L&D situations", we're still just handing out a crutch.

jts wrote:

Thunkd wrote:I do not believe that giving the advice "maybe make your group safer" to someone who has large groups die is inappropriate.

If you interpret this in the narrow way - "Don't let your groups die if you can play a move so that they live" - then of course the advice is appropriate. The key question is, when is the right time to play that move? If I heard, "Play a move to make your groups safe," I assume you mean: "... before they come under attack in the first place." But it's hard to know whether that is actually good advice in Subotai's games.

Without going into the minutia of when it's a good idea to defend and when to call your opponent's bluff, let's just say that if Subotai is playing a tight middle game and then flubbing the L&D at the end, "play a slack middle game" is not winning advice. Even if we rationalize it by saying, "Well, L&D is his weakness, so he should avoid L&D situations", we're still just handing out a crutch.

This is pretty much what I've been thinking. Playing an extra move is fine if you've the life and death skills equal to the task. If, in even games, your groups are constantly dying to moves you don't see coming then automatically playing an extra move in areas is just going to paper over the crack in the wall instead of filling it.

The question is, do we want to win more games now or improve more over the longer term. Surely the latter is more desirable and in this case means figuring out why groups are dying (either you're not reading or your reading isn't good enough for the rank you're playing at usually) and fixing this rather than playing safety moves "just in case," which could turn into a very annoying bad habit.