Day 19 - 1 game (49)

Yesterday I decided to play some Go in the morning rather than in the evening, thinking I could get more games in. Boy was I wrong. The first and only game I played dragged on for nearly eighty minutes! By the time it was over I was quite drained.

Both I (white) and my opponent started with one 4-4 stone and one 3-4 stone. I'm wondering now if I should've played on the other 3-4 point (the one closer to black) as that leaves more territory for me to develop on the top side. The game proper started here:

I've learned by now to not play the atari at C11 without thinking, instead I played it at B10. The fight that followed was messy, with neither of us getting much territory. It looks fairly even, except that I have influence towards the lower side (black's side) whereas black doesn't have any towards my side. Black has a lot of stones on the right side, but they're all on the fourth line so it's not his territory yet.

I couldn't really jump in below the stone at Q13 though, so I decided to try to pincer (hasami) it instead. Black attached with a keima, which worked out very well for me, giving me territory on the right side:

I tried to see what he could've played instead and I'm not entirely sure. The black stone at Q13 is very weak, so he maybe he should've given it up by playing the keima from the other side (R11). I then invaded the bottom left corner, and black did a large mistake by letting me crawl on the second line, never playing the hane. In so doing he gave away a lot of territory.

Black wasn't the only one making mistakes though. When he invaded my top left corner this played out:

My reasoning in these kinds of situations tend to be to play the move that gives my stone the most liberties inside my opponent's potential territory. That way I maximize the amount of moves he has to play to kill it, and in the process he reduces his own eye space. The idiocy of #8 was that I thought to myself that this stone has three liberties, when it obviously doesn't. Playing at either of the two marked spots could have killed black's invasion.

After securing life in the top right, black tried his luck once again, invading my right side:

There are two mistakes from me here. The first isn't a big deal, but #4 takes away one of my own liberties and playing #8 as #4 would have been better. The biggest issue is #8, because it allows black to play T7, which he did. The reason I played #8 was because I wanted to make sure the middle group wouldn't run out of liberties, and putting black into atari means I can capture at any time.

Black did play T7:

At this point one of my groups is going to die. I can atari at S2, but then black ataris at S5. This is what I played, because my first thought was to save the group that was being attacked, but it was yet another mistake. Saving the upper group would have been much better, because that at least kills black's invading group.

This was the board position after thing settled. I don't feel too bad, because at least at my current level it wasn't trivial to read in the heat of the moment. I always get a bit nervous in these invasions though, because as shown here it only takes one stone for the entire house of cards to crumble.

Black let me crawl more with my bottom group for some reason, and I then pushed into his middle territory to reduce his territory by quite a bit. As that started to conclude, we got into a ko:

Of course, in this case it wasn't worth more than a single point, so I figured that when I played F9 black would have to respond, since each stone I play inside his territory takes away 1-2 points. Instead he chose to invade even more, this time at the top. My stones there were already alive though, so this time I didn't have any problem stopping it. In the final board position there were some dame black could have played to make me lose a few points. In a proper game I suppose those points shouldn't have been awarded to me (for example H1):

When all was said and done I won by about 50 points, but when I was playing it felt much closer than that. I do think my opponent made bigger mistakes though, so in the end it was fair.