The Divine Move (Game of Go series) #9

Hello Steeamians !

Today is a day where I review my Go game, here is one that I played today. I wanted to improve myself and gain at least the rank 9kyu in order to be a simple digit kyu player. 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 against a 9 kyu+ Japanese opponent, I was black again and the opening was standard, I played a Chinese opening against two hoshi.

After his high approach on my upper right corner, I played E3 which is a great continuation of my opening. He responded with a joseki for influence and then played once again high against my bottom right corner. At this point, I understood that his strategy was all about influence as you can see he only had one stone on the third line.
It’s now time to mess up his evil plan !

After my response in the corner, I managed to take the initiative and I used it to play on his side because it’s was starting to look very white for my taste. You usually don’t want to see a white stone around my play C10, it would be terrible for black.

I settled down there, then approached his upper left corner with F17 and here is the result. I don’t think it’s joseki at all but I felt ok with this result since it attacked directly his group a little on the left.

He felt that pressure too and his next moves were to settle his group or at least gave it some air to breathe. In this game, I didn’t try to kill any of his group since they all seemed to be fairly safe.

After that, I played mostly big moves like Q12 and B7 while he threatened to capture my stone at J15. When he played Q9, the move on the next picture, I felt like having a big choice to make. Either I play above or under his attachment move, I thought that playing above was too nice so I took the other option.

I was happy with the result since his strategy was about influence and I countered that pretty well with the sequence we played. If you pay attention you may notice that he nearly don’t have points at this time. The only points he gots are on the upper left corner. While for me, I got a lot of almost certain points either on the right side, the lower side and even a little on the left. I thought at that moment that if I don’t make any big mistakes the game had to be won.

After some move in the middle, you can see that his strategy failed. All the influence that he had didn’t serve him well. He still tried to make something of it with moves like F10, unfortunately for him, it was easy for me to destroy the points he was trying to create in the middle. I played H12 in order to do so.

There was nothing really entertaining after that, only endgame moves until I played S1, a tricky move.

You can see that after P5 and R5, I gave him a hard choice, take my stone or protect his group from my latest placed stone. He chose the first option...

… But it was the wrong one, all his group at the bottom right side died because of that. He resigned after that.
I think it was a pretty fun game because even without my kill, the game was won and that proves that making big moves in the opening while your opponent plays smaller moves makes you win the game.
Don’t always answer your opponent move and don’t be afraid to play big move elsewhere on the board !

 

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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 !