I played a two stone handicap game against a 13k today and won by 1.5 points. That's a pretty small margin, and I felt like I mostly got lucky. Even if I didn't, I think some input would be helpful. I've added my own comments to explain what all I was thinking.

3: Fine logic, though approaching him can also be justified if you want to.

10: Hane (on either side) is probably harsher. Nothing is really threatened by white's move, white is only hoping to to better than he deserves in terms of shape here. The hane keeps him in line.

12: Just cutting is probably good here. White doesn't have a neat way to make shape, and the shapes he *can* make are fairly heavy.

24: Magnificent wall. Your move may not actually be best - the wall is so big, that you can play a massive move on the right to attack his stones instead. I'm not sure what's best, but maybe you can even play O4 or so and go for a massive moyo. Your move is big, but I'm not sure it's the biggest (and nothing is urgent).

28: The other side is probably weaker, you can connect there instead.

30: I see no reason not to hane on the bottom instead and save your stones. White's group has nowhere to go...

34: It's hard to say, but I think this is not good. It doesn't threaten white's stones much, and leaves the corner available - when white invades, black will naturally become overconcentrated. I think you should do something on the right, you have a massive wall to work work, the top is small.

35: Yes, he'll give you thickness, but you already have loads of that.

45: Terrible shape, you can start thinking about whether B18 works for you now.

46: At least you get a nice attack now

82: Seeems okay. You'll either kill white on thetop or make a really massive territory here...and these aren't miai, whichever you choose, you still get a try at the other too

88: Nice try, terrible plan. White can play F19 now, and if you capture, F16 kills you anyway. White has too many liberties. Your tesuji at D18 was nice, but should have been too late. Instead, move 84 should have been at F15, then after G14 G13 white is short of liberties and it's looking like you'll easily connect by killing his stones. White can connect underneath, though, but it's annoying to kill those stones anyway (white L16 is annoying) and you don't need to to win.

104: I don't think white can live, but if you want to be sure of killing, try to play a dual purpose move. This move just kills for sure, but N17 (for example) would kill for sure and *also* make white L16 not be sente for him.

110: Very small now that white is alive. Play O4 if rouy want moyoey stuff, or maybe something like R6 since cutting him up is good (with all your strength).

116: Connecting what to what!? Even if you don't invade, the O4 area is clearly the masive area between 'moyos', that's where you need to play. Alternatively, you can look for an annoying invasion point...even taking just the 3-3 might be okay.


I couldn't understand how the game was so close after your massive centre territory, but I looked at the next few moves and it confirmed my fears about what happened. This is a very common ddk/sdk error.

When you defend a moyo by just playing stones in a line when prodded like this, your opponent naturally gets a massive territory. You forgot about attack! Whtie doesn't deserver that entire corner, he doesn't deserve a third of it, but he got it because you played rubbish moves focused only on saving what you'd decided was your territory.

Instead of defending 6 points of reduction, you should have taken the corner or invaded much earlier (there are so many points to do this, that I won't annotate specific moves). Just think what is bigger...6 points or the entire white corner/side? If you play like you actually did, white gets so much for free that the game is close again, and it's very sad.


Finally:

174: You play loads of moves like this. What happens if white plays here? Do you care? Or is this a worthless 0 point gote move?


You didn't play badly, don't get me wrong about my paragraphs of ranting, but you made one small mistake that naturally snowballs into a game changing number of points. Don't do that!

Thanks very much. I totally missed thinking about playing at O4 later in the game, I was too caught up at the top. I can now see where all those points went.

Good call on the capturing race at the top. I don't know how White or I missed that.

On 210: By playing L1, you've already reduced W's territory by 1 point. It seems obvious that once you've played L1 the only consistent followup is K1... but wait! If you play K1, you let W play J14, and you lose one point of territory for sure. (I haven't actually read out why you connected, but let's assume this was the right move.) On the other hand, if you play J14, and let W play K1, you've already reduced his territory by one point, and then you have a ko to determine whether he can recoup that by capturing last.

In other words, when you have a choice between a 1-point move and winning a 1/2-point ko, take the 1-point move; if you end up losing the ko you did no worse, but if you win the ko you gained a point.

....... So now I feel silly for offering such small advice. I'm only a little bit stronger than you, but let me offer two general tips. (Which may be wrong.)

82: You say you're afraid of W thrashing around "inside". Let him thrash! 82 wasn't wrong, but the advantage of losing locally in go is that you get left with desperate, completely expendable groups which you can use to make the game complicated. On the flipside, when you're winning you can't be skittish about making sure dead groups stay dead. If you play conservatively every time W threatens to reverse your tactical victories, you're done for. The thrashing makes go more fun, anyway!

138, 148: Go stones are realllly hard to capture, and when I play go I'm usually so pleased with myself for seeing a way to capture some stones that I feel an urge to go ahead and capture. But I'm slowly learning that there's a huge difference between capturing stones for a strategic purpose (to cut a group in half, or connect two of my groups, or make an eye, or ruin my opponents eye space, or break into a moyo) and capturing stones for points. When you kill an enemy group, or save one of your own, the two stones that you captured have given you something like 20 pts. When you capture two random stones that aren't doing anything special, that's normally 2 pts. ---- This is all a way of thinking about how you should have known to reduce the side and invade the corner earlier. N8 is still only worth about 1 point; the strategic purpose of the stones around N8 is that they provide you with access to the right side, but the N7 stones don't make a difference one way or another. When you saved them, you let W fence off his side, which ruined the only purpose that part of your position had. P8 or P9 is bigger. But the way I think you should think about this is, "I've learned how to capture small groups and save my own, and frequently that's very important, but now I'm being tricked by pattern-recognition; these stones are useless." It's easy to say, in retrospect, that B154 was a bad move, but it's more important to recognize that the various 1- and 2-pt moves leading up to B154 were also smaller than the corner.

Amnal gave you some great advice, so there is not much for me to say. I'd quibble on one point, though.

On move 82, play N12. Now you have three targets. If he plays N12 first, he connects and you have two targets and the biggest one is getting away.
You do not need to attack the three stones to the left. You want them to run: they will just become a bigger target. But if you must attack them, then hane.

EDIT: Move 170: He's bluffing. He has no place to go. Just play F2. ( it threatens D2 )

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Thanks for the further input folks, I really appreciate it.