Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Back to Basics Yet Again

And yet again, I find myself going back to basics. Corner shapes. Been there before, will be there again, and trying to regain my earlier mastery of L-groups, J-groups, and variants. Or should it be called mastery if I have forgotten so many details?

Anyway, I am studying basic corner shapes and pondering the fact that go study always end up going back to basics. How peculiar. And I never seem to have mastered any of the basics as much as I should. How annoying!

Maybe it's time to reread Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go, just need to find some spare time somewhere.

For now, a L-group problem for fun and entertainment, black to play.



Enjoy!

7 comments:

Flame said...

Hint: It's not ko.

Anonymous said...

I found it.

I wrote this long post about what I thought wouldn't work, then I realized, one of my solutions included a self atari on white's part. Black wins by a dead shape inside the other way though, so black just wins. And the third way is only a single eye.

Fun problem.

becci said...

I love this one. :-)

Tommie said...

Dear NannyOgg,

nobody relied until now, so I can as well do it:

i) the first concept 'reduce eye-space' with bP19 fails because of White connection wR18 with miai life capture wO19 or 2nd eye wT18

ii) ditto for bO19, which looks attractive, because W cannot intercept, due to damezumari

iii) standing-up bR19 ?
There is no ishi-no-shita (under the stones) shape here, wS18 captures

iv) bS18? Very often THE move in the localized 1-2 surrounding - however only leading to ko wT18.

This doesn't fully use the circumstances of the (unusual ?) sagari bO19 !

v) leaves bT19.
"C'mon, that's a beginners mistake - White simply captures, you see ?"
However ....

Tommie on GD

Tommie said...

U oh,

I didn't see the other comments when I was posting and
yes, I also love this problem -
close to unsolvable in real games
(if nobody tells you that it is a problem and/or you haven't seen this shape before and b=19 raises your awareness),

Tommie

Unknown said...

Right, it's such a cute little problem. Good reading practice. And yes, I don't think i would have found it in a real game. I would have read out the first few and said 'ah, ko!' never finding the better solution.

Go is fun!

Nanny

Anonymous said...

Like all knowledge, and the universe itself, Go patterns and levels are certainly open-ended. And so you could never know it all: there will always be a higher level. Besides which: you can only fix knowledge in your mind, at greater and greater detail, by revisiting this knowledge periodically. That's the way brain works. And so you're only doing and experiencing what is natural about learning.

But I'm sure you really already know all that.
:)