Avalanche Madness

Minue has been teaching me several contemporary variations of the large avalanche joseki. It has been utterly fascinating to me, seeing all the half dead groups, learning interesting tesuji and new shapes.



I don't expect to use it in games much, but studying it is giving me a new sense of power. Of course, next time I play it in a game, I am just as likely to mess it up as to get it right, but I will be able to learn from that too, right?

And for now, it gives me something to do when I take the Oggettes to the playground.

Game Record of Mirror Handi Game

I uploaded the game record of the mirror handicap game. I still have no idea how I should have resisted his strategy. I did consider mirroring him after I played tengen, like someone suggested, but that somehow felt wrong. I didn't want to stoop down to his lows.

It is an interesting problem. He ended up winning the game by 10.5 points, so I guess his strategy was successful this game. I don't think he is learning much about go though.

Mirror Go in Handicap Game

Last week, I was playing on one of my bogus accounts when I ran into this situation. I always play Chinese rules, so that means free handicap placement. This was a 4H game and he placed his handicap stones like this.



I thought 'Great! This is going to be an interesting game!' I wasn't too worried. I figured he might not know how to use this power. And if he did, we would have some good fighting, which is always fun.

Well... It didn't take long for me to realize what he was doing.



He was mirroring my moves... I know there are ways of breaking mirror go, involving ladders and such. But in this case, his four center handicap stones were interfering with that. I took a long break to ponder what to do and came up empty.

So I played a bit more and then decided to stop the mirroring. I played 29 as a probe to see what he would do, he replied at 30.



I tried to set up things so that if he would mirror more, it would go bad for him, but not for me. I wasn't very succesful at it though. He stopped mirroring anyway.

I have been pondering what to do next time this happens. Play the tengen move sooner and take it from there? Are there other strategies I can use? It's an interesting question, I welcome any input people have on it.

The Sorry State of My Social Life

Oh noes! KGS is down again! Let's hope it's not going to be another three days.

The recent and current KGS problems have shown me something I hadn't noticed before. I hadn't realized that almost every single one of my gtalk contacts is a go player. During the Long KGS Outage, almost everyone's first message would be about kgs being down.

And if I hadn't lost misplaced my cell phone, you would notice that 95 % of my contacts on there are go players too.

I guess today will be go study day instead of chatting playing. Or maybe I should try having a life! OK, maybe not ^^ Time to work on haengma problems.

Row, Row, Row Your Boat

Yes, I know, I haven't been posting much. I have been playing and studying, but not as much as usual because of some family stress. In between all the stress, we still manage to get baduk in though, at interesting locations.



Click here for more photos at this Vermont lake.

Baduk in Vermont

Playing go outdoors is addictive. This time, we got ourselves to the top of a local mountain.



Many more pictures can be found on my flickr site. Who wants to play indoors when the weather is this nice?