10/01/2014

Quote Mania 5

Welcome to 'Quote Mania', the series where I take a random quote completely out of context and forcefully relate it to go!
The 5th quote to be discussed is:


'People die if they are killed.'
 It's from the anime Fate/Stay Night. (but I just saw it floating around the internet)


Alright, this is not a serious quote, but it can actually be related to go quite simply. At least, if you replace 'people' with 'stones'. Unless you want to go all nuclear tesuji on people and smash their heads in with a go board, but that is a different story all together.

You see, I know that it's very important to not leave any weak groups on the board. There are like a million (ok, two) proverbs about it, and it's mentioned pretty much everywhere.
Actually, my style of play is quite safe, but sometimes I get a little over confident. Basically I take a big point, believing that my group will life anyway. In the process I leave the group looking like this:

And usually, I am right. The group CAN live. But while I make petty moves doing that, my opponent takes control of the entire board.

Trying to lessen my 'safe-play' is all nice and well, but I shouldn't be taking the wrong approach to it and stop defending. I should defend and then attack, not attack and then defend.


The quote is true, my group will die if it's killed. The issue is that it won't get killed. It will get kicked around, tortured and left near-death. And all in vain, because the game will be lost.




PS. There probably won't be any updates for at least 3 weeks. After that I will go to BIBA and see if I can update from there, and otherwise I'll be back in 5 weeks :).