Unexpected Move

I am really enjoying my more frequent playing and I get lots of opportunities to learn new things. Too bad I hadn't read Go Game's Guru article 5 Tips for Dealing with Unexpected Moves yet when I played this game. My opponent surprised me by playing A in reply to my pincer.

 

Even although I did stay calm (tip 1) I did not particularly respect my opponent ('This must be a mistake or a misclick or just no clue what he is doing'). I didn't really take my time to figure out his plan or read out everything. I just started playing in reply and hoping for the best. At first it seemed to be ok.

 

Until it wasn't ok anymore. Oops. This was a very bad not good result at all.

 

By now I have done some preliminary research and Kogo's says that this indeed is an existing move (who wouldave thunk!?) 'A special strategy, if White has something like the High Chinese Fuseki on the lower side..'

I also found the move in some pro games but haven't really figured out yet what to do next time. I guess it should be on my 'moves to study' list.

The game can be found here.

Promoted!

In January I have been playing in the ASR league which is divided up in different layers: Super, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon. Every month the league promotes the top 4 players in a class and demotes the lowest 8 players.

 

I started out in Delta and first thought I would just play the minimum number of games to stay in my group (which is four games) and get enough points not to get demoted. Of course in the end my natural competitive instinct kicked in and I decided to try for promotion after all.

 

A few days before the end of the month I looked for a few more games and managed to get myself in the top 4 players.

 

This month I am a proud member of one of the Gamma groups. I bet promotion from this one is going to be harder though so we'll see what happens.