Tenuki - go
I’m currently studying a game:
22nd NHK Semi-Final
1975, 03/09
W: Takemiya Masaki
B: Go Seigen
What interests me about this game is that, in the fuseki, Takemiya tended to jump around a lot. I’m not sure how normal this fuseki is: the game is not shown on fuseki.info, but all of the games available in their free database divert after four moves (perhaps order is different…)
This isn’t the only interesting thing, though. One of the comments in a recent panda mail-magazine game (Yamada Kimio’s “To the Point Commentary” No. 93) says “Black should switch to a large fuseki point elsewhere.” It’s amazing to me that this type of small moves made because the player is tied-up in thinking about one part of the board still occur between 1d players. It seems to me that this type of idea is one of the most important to fix in order to reach IGS shodan.
This seems like a striking example of efficiency. Many of us [moderate] weaker players are drilled in ignoring one-point “sente” moves played by our opponent in the endgame in order to play a larger (or more-sente) move elsewhere. This is also how the begin-game should run, though it’s even harder to determine when a group is safe and when a certain point is too small.
I’m proposing to ask myself the following questions during my begin-game:
- Does my opponent threaten to take a lot of territory somewhere?
- Does the territory my opponent wants to take look smaller than a big point elsewhere?
In addition, I’m going to treat all single stones as extremely light. My fuseki focus should be on making the most money in a short period of time - even if it means losing out a bit in one area… My thoughts on this are based primarily on the popular modern fuseki where B gets two hoshi, W takes hoshi and 3-4, and B approaches the 3-4 at the 3-6.
Make the game easier by playing well in the begin-game.