Life In 19x19

It seems that whenever I play the Chinese fuseki, I wind up with little territory on the side where I play it, but if my opponents play it, they end up with a bunch of territory. By the same token, if I play a pincer attack I consistently wind up with two weak groups, while if my opponents play a pincer attack I'm the one to wind up with a weak group. Indeed, I've got quite a few games I could have posted for review where I try to play aggressively and things seem to go wrong almost immediately.

(There's also the irritation that most of my opponents seem to play really fast while I spend a fair amount of time thinking about my moves, and they still get much better results.)

2 things I noticed (will look through the game further, but this is right off the bat,

1) You said his move 10 on the left side in the opening was "Not joseki" and wondered if the right move to respond WAS the joseki.

In this case, the answer is definitely no, but the nature of the comment worries me, it suggests that your brain is moving in and out of a "Joseki"-mode, which could be hindering your progress.

The correct move in this case is to block the corner, at F3, it works with your low chinese formation and gives him a big problem to deal with.

Seriously, don't even worry about "What is joseki" until you're at least dan level, and you know that what is joseki is heavily dependent on the arrangement of the stones elsewhere. Something might not be joseki in a vacuum, but be ideal for a particular position.

Joseki should give you ideas of what is possible, not be a prescription for play.

2) H4 made my eyes bleed.

EDIT:

3) You're not comfortable sealing him in when there are cuts, as a result he walks right through your attacks. If you're going to attack, you're going to have to grit your teeth and go into battle.

I would say you play fairly fast too!

I won't give you any specific suggestions about the Chinese fuseki, other than to say that the general idea is, if your opponent ignores your Chinese corner, you keep expanding it. If after the that defines Chinese you go gallivanting off all over the rest of the board, the lower left will not magically be black territory at the end of the game; does not have occult powers. Anyway, here are some notes on the beginning, take them with a grain of salt.

11: I agree, but I don't think this is bad, either.
14: Stones on the fourth line can be slippery, but even if they're hard to kill outright they can still be attacked. L14, P17, Q14, all increase pressure on the stone.
15: Definitely not small.
17: How does this attack N3?
25: This is not that horrible. I prefer it to R12. Connecting at R7 would be the simplest way to play, but a splitting attack might also be interesting.
31: You're creating broken shape on a largish scale. Your choices are to hane here, with the aim of keeping W separated, or to hane at
35: N5 is a much bigger group, and also weak. My instinct is to prosecute the attack on that group to the fullest, and then attack Q12 as the booby prize if the attack fails. (Locally, this is a great move, though.)
43: Broken shape. Just block. What's the worst he can do?

Maybe more later.

A few comments.



Main focus: Divide and conquer!

shapenaji wrote: 2) H4 made my eyes bleed.

I had been been tempted to post just to call that one move out.

shapenaji wrote:2) H4 made my eyes bleed.

So you're saying it's the Eye Reddening Move? Seriously, I was trying to connect to the stone in the bottom center.

1) You said his move 10 on the left side in the opening was "Not joseki" and wondered if the right move to respond WAS the joseki.

In this case, the answer is definitely no, but the nature of the comment worries me, it suggests that your brain is moving in and out of a "Joseki"-mode, which could be hindering your progress.

The correct move in this case is to block the corner, at F3, it works with your low chinese formation and gives him a big problem to deal with.

I was thinking of the "Recognition vs. Understanding" thread that was over in General Discussions a few weeks back. One of the problems I have with joseki is the question of what to do when my opponent plays a move that's unfamiliar to me. At that point, you have to play from first principles, and a lot of the time, I can't even figure out what the right idea is, much less find the move that implements that idea.

Or to put it another way that I think I said on one of the threads about turn-based servers many moons back, "I can play from the joseki dictionary, but when I get to the end of the line, I find myself thinking, 'Now what the hell do I do?'"

3) You're not comfortable sealing him in when there are cuts, as a result he walks right through your attacks. If you're going to attack, you're going to have to grit your teeth and go into battle.

It's just as much that I didn't even see the move that would seal him in. I didn't even notice my idea to play :47: in the opposite direction until about the third or fourth time I was going through the game to make comments about it.

More generally, the moves that all of you commented on as the big mistakes were things that I never even thought of as mistakes when I was analyzing it afterwards.

Thanks all for the reviews; obviously I have a lot to work on.

Fedya wrote:... if I play a pincer attack I consistently wind up with two weak groups, while if my opponents play a pincer attack I'm the one to wind up with a weak group...

I think this sums up your problem perfectly, but the problem is one of perception, not reality. From your comments on the game, it appears that you are constantly worried about the safety of your own stones. That is all well and good, but you need to spend an equal effort worrying about the safety of your opponents stones. On the few occasions where you recognize a weak group and start to attack, you break off the attack very soon to play a safety move, letting your opponent off the hook.

Maybe a good exercise would be to switch sides mentally from time to time, and consider the board position from your opponents point of view. If you see a weak group that you would feel impelled to defend, switch back to your own point of view and attack it.

When you spot a weak group and initiate an attack from a position of strength, do not be afraid to cut and fight. Instead of thinking "I am going to get cut, my groups will become weak, I must defend" try to think "his groups are weak, I am going to cut, I will attack strongly and profit". If your games never feature a fight to the death, you are playing too passively.

Fedya wrote: (...)One of the problems I have with joseki is the question of what to do when my opponent plays a move that's unfamiliar to me. (...)

Read. In any case - read. If you see the situation for the first time - read as deep as you can and try to evaluate the outcome. If it's good for you (in your opinion) - play it, if not - don't. But on the simplest level - read while playing and forget all about "joseki" stuff. This is not a game about mirroring stuff from the books. Be creative. And read.

p.s. I will tell you my little dirty secret: if you really, really need to learn joseki (at your level at least) - learn about trickplays first, and play them a lot. It's a better learning tool, especially when you face the opponent who know exactly how to punish these trickplays. Then you can erase this trickplay from your dictionary, but remember the correct punishment method.

Go captain!