The Divine Move (Game of Go series) #18

Hello Steeamians !

Today is a day where I review my Go game, here is one that I played today.
My main objective when I started playing Go was to be a single digit kyu player, in other word, become 9 kyu. After nearly two years of playing, I managed to do it but I’m not stopping there, now I look above at the 5 kyu rank which is pretty symbolic too. Wish me good luck !
I hope you'll enjoy this game !

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Just know that this game is simply amazing ! If you like strategy game like chess, it's even a better game, simpler but deeper.
I made a post with the basic rules, you can find it here.

So I really encourage you to check out the game and here are more links that could help :
A site where you can easily play.
An amazing Youtube channel
Some playlists for beginner (FR)
A playlist for beginner (EN)
A post about Go vocabulary

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Now, back to the game !

I played this game as black against an 8 kyu opponent. I started with my favorite opening and he made a San-Rei-Sei.

After a kinda strange exchange in my bottom corner and an H4 pincer for him, I decided to approach his upper corner because I didn’t really know what to do.

In response to my approach, he added another stone D2 in order to be sure to have his corner. After that, we did a strange exchange in the upper corner, I was feeling confident at that time but I shouldn’t have been.

I shouldn’t because I was weaker than I thought and he cut me with R10. I had to give up something and I decided to let him connect both of his group. I thought that I could attack his group near P7 with that decision.

However, my plan didn’t work out as great as I expected because it was me who was under attack. He even cut part of my group. I had to run to the center in order to make my group alive.

After 20 or so moves, I managed to live but at a huge cost. He didn’t have any weakness while I still had some pretty much everywhere. You can see that nearly all the bottom side is white territory.

We fought a little in the upper side and I misread a sequence so he captured my stones near F17. It was a smaller mistake than the one at the beginning of the game but still I gave up some points again.

I was pretty desperate at that moment so I tried to invade and live in his corner, I managed to do so in exchange of two stones.

After that, I played a tricky move C12 which threatened a ladder for his three stones at E12. He didn’t see it and I could capture them.

At that moment, I thought the game was lost so I played abusive moves over and over. Here is a little reduction that I made on his left side.

After that reduction, we only played endgame moves until, after reading for quite a long time, I found a tricky sequence which allowed me to capture his entire group at Q13. I first had to reduce his number of liberties and T18 is the beginning.

With P13, I reduced his amount of liberties again.

T13 is the Tesuji which allows me to gain one extra liberty, you can see that now he can’t play T12 because it’s self-atari. It’s now a capture race between that group and his big white at Q14.

I managed to win that capture race and by so the game ! I looked at the score if I didn’t do that and I would lose by 40 points, that’s a huge loss. Anyway, I was happy with this win even if I don’t think I really deserve it.

 

 
I hope you enjoyed this little game review, tell me in the comment what do you think about this content.
Here is my profile page on OGS, add me as a friend and we'll do a game !
Check out another of my Go review here

See you tomorrow !