Day 14 - 2 games (39), 21 kyu

I finally bit the bullet and moved on to 19x19 games. It wasn't quite as overwhelming as I thought it'd be, but they do take significantly longer. My first game was a bit of a drag, because my opponent played bizarre and seemingly random moves, yet we played out the entire thing. It happens. The second one turned out to be more interesting.

When I find out who I'm playing and see that they're a few ranks higher than I my reaction tends to be "oh crap". In this game I drew a 19 kyu - 3 ranks higher than myself. It being my first proper 19x19 games I wasn't feeling to confident. The game started off in an unusual way, with white not taking his second corner:

I'm not entirely sure why I played this hane; I didn't want to fight and luckily I didn't get one. Instead we kept extending downward, with me "getting" a lot of territory on the right side. being that far away from the edge though, I wouldn't say it was mine yet:

Eventually white decided to cut and try to make something happen:

I felt like I had a lot of room to work with, so I simply tried to contain white and prevent him from making eyes that way. At this point I started getting nervous, because my large group only had two liberties and I thought for a while about which atari to play. Eventually I decided on the P12 one:

After this I was able to kill white, but having all his stones there (and several of mine with very few liberties) did make me a little uneasy. Finally, I decided to take the left corner. Now, I wasn't too happy about slowly crawling my group across the board, because I know it's an inefficient way to play, but I never felt safe enough to take the corner at earlier points in the game.

White's move #6 above was a mistake, because it let me break out towards the centre. As was #9, since I didn't have to answer it at all. I started working my way up the left side, then tried to set up this cut I had noticed a while earlier:

I'm unsure about this hane, it could have turned out quite messy:

In the end it didn't, and I managed to connect my cutting group to my left side group. In all honesty I think white made that too easy, and it probably shouldn't have worked. White tried to live in the upper left corner, and I was fine with that thinking that maybe I could kill his upper right group, or at least take most of the territory at the top.

At this point white initially played N19, and I stared at it for a while thinking he was dead, then I saw that he requested an undo, which I accepted. He then, to my surprise, played O16 instead. After the game I saw that white was actually dead either way. In the last phase of the game I tried to reduce white's territory by crawling into the middle. Sadly, white was able to play F6 before I could make a move there. Otherwise I could have made something happen, maybe even kill white's lower left group. My last move at L3 was just to try and see if my opponent would screw up and maybe let me kill the bottom right group, but he didn't.

All in all, a fun game. I didn't make any stupid, game ending blunders for once!