Life In 19x19

I posted this game in my study journal - it's from a while ago (my rating has improved since then though I'm not sure I'm any smarter) but I definitely want some feedback on it, so please excuse the crosspost (I'll remove it from there is admins or anyone else have strong feelings).

During the game I felt good, until suddenly I didn't - I'd been trying to exercise my mewly discovered patience, for example, and don't think I'd done anything really unreasonable. This in itself was a pretty good thing, coming from me - normally I try a bunch of (in retrospect) unreasonable things, and sometimes win because my opponent doesn't refute them as well as I later discover they could have.

I have regrets about and think my opponent let me off the hook with his wide pincer. Even so, the sequence to seems dubious for White.

The shoulder hit at seemed like a good idea at the time. And indeed the end result was OK for me but it occurs to me that 1) I hadn't thought too hard about a followup and 2) there were better ideas.

I had this idea of making Black choose one of his vulnerable groups to get attacked. Actually this never happened because he just sealed off the large corner, and the group in the middle was completely alive.

At I was feeling very comfortable and in comments, my opponent assessed the game similarly. But, sometime during the ensuing attacks, I fatally misread. Some time after Black 113 I should have realised I needed to kill the corner immediately. But now, looking back at it, I am not entirely sure I know when that was - it wasn't a simple miscount, and I was actually in trouble sometime before I thought.

Help?

(Other more general advice on the game gratefully received, as always)

I used my credit on Crazy Sensei to have this game analyzed at its 4d level, and here's what I've gleaned about my questions below.

(Full analysis here.)

joellercoaster wrote:I have regrets about and think my opponent let me off the hook with his wide pincer. Even so, the sequence to seems dubious for White.

CS actually agreed with me on as its #1 play. It didn't hate Black's wide pincer (though it was its #3 choice) either... it regarded the jump into the corner at as the actual blunder.

EDIT: At this point in the game, CS has Black ahead, as a result of the bad corner exchange (also I should have played at the 2-2 point to live).

The shoulder hit at seemed like a good idea at the time. And indeed the end result was OK for me but it occurs to me that 1) I hadn't thought too hard about a followup and 2) there were better ideas.

CS was not a fan of this move, though its "blunder bar" was not huge (by the standards of this game, anyway). It regarded the top and right as more important - either lead the white group out (jump to O11 or horse's head/cap at L14) or invade the right at Q9 or R8).

:w58: I had this idea of making Black choose one of his vulnerable groups to get attacked. Actually this never happened because he just sealed off the large corner, and the group in the middle was completely alive.

As you might expect, CrazySensei's blunder siren went off at this point. Though it did have the hane one space to the left at F2 as a lower-down possibility, it really wanted me to take the sente peep at P8 (and then extend at O11 and sacrifice the peeping stone), or possibly cut at L4 - I couldn't make this work to kill the group, but CS wanted to use it as a squeeze, which I had completely missed.

At I was feeling very comfortable and in comments, my opponent assessed the game similarly.

CS agreed - win rate for White at this point was about 70%.

But, sometime during the ensuing attacks, I fatally misread. Some time after Black 113 I should have realised I needed to kill the corner immediately. But now, looking back at it, I am not entirely sure I know when that was - it wasn't a simple miscount, and I was actually in trouble sometime before I thought.

This is where it gets interesting.

At the blunder alarm goes off again. CS at this stage favoured the one-space jump to F17, which would have made the top left corner's death and my resignation not a thing. Black's next move also misses this (CS at this point in the game starts flashing red on both sides) but Black gradually claws his way back into the game. After some cut and thrust, both of us play fairly reasonably for a while until move 118, at which point the game appears even again.

At this point Black plays 119 at our old friend O11. As previously noted this is big, but in the context of the battle for the top, not urgent - CS marks this as a huge blunder and Black's winrate plummets back to its low levels when I was feeling good.

We fight a bit, neither of us doing amazingly, until the game-defining screwup happens at White 140 - at this point my best option was to start the ko in the corner, and I was still looking OK.

Interestingly, at no point was the question really "when should I kill the corner" as I thought. CS wanted me to keep attacking the group at the top.

The moral of this story? Once more, the proverb: The loser is the one who makes the last big mistake.

(By the way, this whole exercise has convinced me to buy CrazyStone as a learning tool. Awesome.)