As entropi said, that depends on your interpretation of the "intented gameplay". If for Go it is "to win the game", you can happily argue for trick moves. If it is "to play the best game possible", they are always wrong. If for a Rubik's cube it is "have a solved cube", you can happily argue for taking it apart and putting it back together. If it is "solve only in the same way as Rubik's original test for his students" then taking it apart is always wrong.

The goal is "winning within the boundaries of the rules". If it was just winning, you could spike your opponent's drink, re-arrange some stones when he's not looking or bribe him with a box of cookies. Those, to me, would be analogies to the disassembling of the cube. Trick moves don't stray from the rules or the way go is played.

But anyway, I'm not actually using hamete in my games. For one, I don't know any (haven't read up on them), and second, my goal is to make "good moves" (within the limit of my ability). As you put it (very well, by the way!), the opponent in my games is myself, not the other player. But I don't see anything wrong with people using trick play. If I encountered it commonly in my games, or if it irritated me, I'd try and learn hamete. Pretty much like I approach other aspects of the game too (e.g. looking into high/low Chinese when I first saw it recurring and not having a good idea how to deal with it).

If nothing else, it's a great excuse to buy yet another book.

These actions are frowned upon ??

I yield! You win. :p (Without spiking, bribing and cheating! Darn, you're good!)

I know this feeling! I like being the cat.

Now to touch on the original topic - if you get clobbered at a tournament because you used a 'trick move' and your opponent refuted it, no complaining.

On the other hand, getting taken in by a trick move necessitates that you study that trick move and make sure it doesn't happen again.

There was a time when many of these trick moves might have been considered normal moves. It was only when they were solved and shown to be bad for one side if refuted that they became hamete.

Some of us like to live in the past, so...

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Here we're using a narrow definition of trick play: a move that you know is bad, but is difficult to refute, and you have a continuation prepared. But what about more generally "tricky" play?

Let's say I spend a lot of time studying joseki that aren't too well known, like 3-5 openings. I learn the more complex variations, and how to force 3-5 openings into trickier lines (like Taisha, say). I play 3-5 points every game, and when the opponent enters I try to force the most difficult variations.

From a professional's perspective, a lot of my joseki choices will be bad: I'm choosing sequences that are difficult, not sequences that are good in the local position, etc. If someone knows the joseki as well as I do, I'll probably come out a little behind. But I'm forcing my opponent into situations where I hope I'm more comfortable than they are. Someone who doesn't know the joseki will probably come out a lot worse.

Am I being dishonest? If I were playing myself, as topazg suggests, there would be no point to playing this way, because of course I know all the joseki that I know! But I think many players don't have a problem with this type of playing.

In my view, the acceptability of trick moves depends on your aim when playing.

I distinguish three aims:

1) to create a beautiful game
2) to create an interesting game
3) to win

Optimal moves are characteristic of a beautiful game, complicating and new moves of interesting games and psychological moves (based on an evaluation of the opponent' skills), such as trick moves, of games where winning is the sole aim.

When I play, I have all three aims and they are all legitimate ones, I think. However, at least to me, the most noble aim is to create a beautiful game (the least noble is to win). So, usually, I start out preferring optimal beautiful moves. However, when I have made the first serious blunders and a beautiful even game is out of reach, I often prefer complicating moves to optimal moves, to make sure that I at least get an interesting game. I also gradually start considering trick moves to get back into the game. If at the end of a game I think a trick move might turn a loss into a win, I will usually play it.

In the course of reading this post one more time (in an effort to delete the portions I had not intended to respond to) I changed what I wanted to say and left the quote intact.

I thought, and still think, that the priorities listed above are in the wrong order, certainly winning must come first.

This is a game, with a goal, and any judgment of beauty or interest can only be made based on a moves ability to attain that goal. We can make good shape to our heart's content, but if the move does not serve to lead us down a winning path, there is no beauty, or interest, there is only misplaced artifice.

On second reading, I realized that the poster arleady knows this, even without realizing it, or admitting it. Though he claims winning is the least noble aim, he admits he jettisons beauty and interest for the down and dirty when the situation demands it. His philosophy may be flawed (in my view) but his actions speak the truth - I want to win pretty, I want to win fun, but ultimately - I want to win.

As for trick plays, they are completly legit - but I would advise caution. If you understand all the ramifications, and you are a good fighter for your level, then by all means, take advantage, or fight your way back from any modest disadvantage. But do not think half understanding a trick play is a substitute for fighting strength - if you are not a fighter, then they are crutches of the wrong length with missing bolts.

I met and played someone who was intent on creating a beautiful game once. He was an artist from my hometown.

He seemed to be a little crazy. He was about 20kyu, and start rambling about how my white stones stretched across the board looked like a beautiful river running through a field of cows.

Beautiful has got to be the wrong word to describe that.

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If you follow this line of argument, you must also claim that a beautiful or interesting game does not exist, because someone lost it.

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Patience, grasshopper.

There are also clever or beautiful moves that fail.
Better yet, maybe a not so beautiful move countered the beautiful one.

Where does that leave us?


And no footpads.

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Ko is the best solution.
With Ko, I can keep eating and drinking until I am full.

Visit >>>Koosh's Study Journal<<<

If it is a clever or beautiful move, it is implied that it succeeds. Otherwise it wouldn't be so clever or beautiful, now would it?

No footpads? Phew, I hate it when I'm robbed by my crutches.~ (Pardon the bad pun)

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I think you follow your own argument here, not mine. I simply maintain that the inherent beauty of any move is based on its impact on the goal of the game - to win. There are many pro games where mistakes, if any, are too subtle for us to understand, the game is beautiful and interesting...yet someone loses.

A move can be be beautiful and interesting if it gives one the best chance of winning - even if it fails. But any illusion of artistic worth must be guaged in its value on the bottom line.

This is a really interesting post. If I started to feel this way about Go I would lose interest overnight and find something else to do with my spare time.

I thoroughly enjoy not agreeing with you that winning must come first

I'm not following the argument that winning is not the most important thing. If the top pro players felt this way, how would we ever advance our knowledge of the game? Sure in a teaching game it's fine to not focus on the result, but without playing serious tournament-style games how are you ever going to get better or know how strong you are? If you play trick moves that you know are suboptimal then in the long run this will hurt your game, but more importantly, it's probably bad for you to be wasting your time memorizing complicated trick josekis in the first place. If my opponent successfully tricks me I don't get mad- I just realize that I learned something and try my best to recover.

From Kageyama's introduction to Chapter 2 of A Compendium of Trick Plays:

"There are those who study the opening or joseki, but it seems that those who deliberately set out to study trick plays are few in number. Just the words 'trick plays' conjure up images of swindling, of taking the low road, of dirty underhandedness; going so far as to coinsider that the aesthetics of the game of go are sullied by them. Should one clumsily apply such research and study, one might find imputations directed against one's character. What miserable soul would devote serious attentions to these kinds of matters?

"In fact, in the past I too thought this way. That was around the time I was amateur 1 kyu or shodan.

"However, seeing a trick play in the classical praxis of Honinbo Dosaku turned my attitude 180 degrees around. Is it likely that a Meijin whose name has gone down in the annals of history would use a so-called vicious technique, I asked myself, and without even verifying the facts of the situation, I looked beyond the unpleasant nuances of the words 'trick play' and felt ashamed of my own narrow-minded thinking. Since that time I have assiduosly researched trick plays. And at the same time I have realized that an appreciation of the fascination inherent in trick plays has been instrumental in boosting my strength in go, insofar as it has made apparent the interrelationship and operation of the stones and skillful technique [tesuji]."

That's really interesting. One aspect my conception of hamete is that at my level you know hamete if you memorize hamete, and if you don't memorize them you can't see the trap in advance; but as players' reading abilities wax they can simply read out the whole sequence so, at higher levels, the whole concept of hamete evaporates.

Do you know which Dosaku game inspired Kageyama?

I am either not expressing myself well, or I do not understand this response.

I am not saying win at any cost (cheat, misdirect, rudeness etc). I am not saying that playing this game in order to appreciate its beauty is not valid.

I am simply saying that you cannot judge the beauty or interest of this game without putting the goal of winning first and foremost. It is the yardstick upon which all else must be measured.

For example, if a game is hopelessly lost - any claim to making a "beautiful" or "interesting" move is misguided. There is not beauty in keeping the loss to under 30pts. The only move of any elegance is to resign. This is because the beauty and interest at this point cannot serve a goal to win, in fact they simply can be as crude as a trick play at the beginning.

It simply is not go and not a worthy journey to attempt to play a beautiful fuseki and then object to your own success when your opponent is compelled to disrupt things with an "ugly" invasion by taking the attitude "You have ruined this beautiful game with this move" On the contrary, he may have acknowledged the beauty of your play - and you must now use your wonderful formation to beautifully punish his play - you are not crudely coming down to his level, you are stylishly demonstrating the effectiveness of your play. You cannot continue with "beautiful" peaceful moves and ignore the fight.

I do not see where this is a feeling that causes one to lose interest. Without the goal of the game in sight, one mans beautiful double wing formation cannot be superior to another's beautiful crawling second line life.

As I said earlier I don't really believe this. Most hamete rely on the opponent seeing the trick play as overplay and trying to punish it. After they aggressively cut/captured/whatever and got what they wanted they look around and realize that the game has just radically shifted in their opponents favor.

If you think your opponent is just playing a new move you'll try to whether the storm and play defensively. You might still lose some points but you won't have been tricked.

That's where the definition of trick play comes in again that was raised earlier in this thread. Does a complicated taisha joseki, that you've studied earlier and your opponent not count as a trick play?

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While I was teaching the game to a friend of mine, my mother from the other room:
"Cutting? Killing? Poking out eyes? What the hell are you playing?"