Day 12 - 1 game (35), 23 kyu

Sadly I didn't have time for more than one game yesterday, so this will probably be a brief entry. My opponent didn't a strange, middle of the road opening that didn't accomplish much, so I invaded:

Black responded with 4-4, and I wasn't sure whether to crawl left or up. Obviously I have the stone at L10, but the black stone at K7 is more in the way than the two stones on the lower side of the board. I picked going up anyway though, and after a few moves came to this point:

This looks similar to the 3-3 invasion joseki a commenter pointed me to, except for the black stone at K3 being at K7 instead, and the fact that black played a hane with #1. I remember thinking in the game that this situation was bad for me, and that I needed to connect, but there's actually nothing white can do at this point except to give up the stone at #2. If black plays A then white can't play B, because then black plays C which is atari again. I should probably have played B instead of #2. If this was the joseki though, then I'm not sure. Would I cut at L7?

I actually didn't notice how important C was until black played it, but because he didn't have the stone at K3 I could still make the group live in the bottom right corner. Then there were two moves that I'm not sure about. The first is

My idea was to play away and secure the top side, which I did, but I feel like I didn't get much influence towards the centre. Similarly with this move, I wonder if it wasn't greedy enough:

Here I wanted the corner, for obvious reasons, but here the problem is the same, that black's centre is very big. The game, for all intents and purposes, ended here (black tried to invade but failed):

Now, while it turns out that I had more territory (before komi), I wasn't sure who was going to win before OGS popped up the score. Black's territory looks big to the eye, even now, however I never tried to count it. Maybe I wasn't being too safe after all?

The lesson from this game was to watch out for the stupid shape in the first picture, I'll vow to not do it again. Until the next time.