Day 23 - 1 game (51)

Because I've been traveling I've been out of time to play. The other night I thought I'd squeeze in one game late at night, but I don't know if I got much out of it. I matched with a 12 kyu and I don't know if it was because he was so much better than I, or if it was because it was a game with a short timer, but it felt like every move I made was the wrong one.

Black played a strange opening move which I ignored and instead tried to take some corners. Maybe black simply wanted to give me a handicap:

I don't think this looks horrible for me, but I wasn't sure how to respond here:

I wanted to play #2 at C4, but then I would get the shape I mentioned having read about being bad. I then tried to break out into the centre from my corner groups:

To me it looks, at this point, like it might work in the top right, but in the bottom I think #28 should have been at M5 instead and it might not have been cut off. I then proceeded to throw away a bunch of stones on the right side:

I realised that it wasn't going to work much earlier than this, but I didn't have any better ideas so I thought that I might as well keep at it a bit longer. At this point it was clearly time to try something else, so I attempted to connect my middle stones to the group in the top right, which I thought might live.

That did of course not work either and I got utterly destroyed trying to capture some of black's stones. Throughout the entire game black was much better at keeping his stones connected, and like magic he would always have enough extra liberties that I could never capture any of his groups!

So, I didn't get to play much, but I did do a lot of problems in my new book. As I understand it you're meant to do them fully in your head and not look at solutions. For the most part I've been avoiding the latter, but I will check every so often to make sure I'm on the right track. There is one problem (#119) that I don't understand the solution for though, which has to do with counting territory. The goal is to count the points for this board position:

Now, I suppose there are a few different ways the score could be counted. This books says that captured stones should be placed inside the corresponding player's territory, so they subtract points from one player instead of adding them to the other, but it's of course the same in the end. By doing this and counting the territory I get 31 points for each player. The book tells me that it's still a draw (no komi), but 28 points for each player. It suggests that the board should be rearranged in this fashion:

This left me even more confused. First of all I'm not sure why the territory in the middle was filled in. Secondly black still has two prisoners, even though all prisoners were supposed to be moved. Finally, white has 28 points of unoccupied territory and black has 26. So it's not a tie and it doesn't even add up to 56. The point of doing this is to make it easier to count the score, so clearly I'm missing something.