Alejo's Tenuki

Since the network configuration at my job place is somewhat restrictive, all real-time servers such as KGS don't work. The solution I came up with is playing through turn-based servers like Dragon Go Server.

Unfortunatelly, my account was created in 2006, as a 30k. And still has the same ranking. So I'm rapidly climbing in the ladder, but I'm just playing a very interesting game with a couple of life-and-death problems.

The game started very peacefully, both of us creating big moyos, which didn't last too long before being invaded. My invasion seems to have reached success since it has been finally connected to a stone freely placed in tengen. But I felt a lot of pressure from my opponents attack, so I had to run for life...

His invasion is still on the go:

As you can see above, black is somewhat into trouble because of the surrounding white strength, but white does have some weaknes which could be exploited.

It took us over a day to make the last 15 moves, so most moves are well-thought. They may be wrong, but I've carefully thought about this situation.

The move sequence on the real game was this one:

As you can see, B 77, tried to connect and scape. B 81 created a possible ko-eye, which was turned into a false eye by W 82. This last move was unnecesarily answered with B83, since it was a bamboo joint and allowed me to make an extra move: W 84, and thus removing some extra eye space, but allowing black to take W 82 and convert the false eye into a real one.

After this exchange, black is trying to escape by peeping on a single jump. According to popular wisdom: "even a moron connects against a peep", I happened to ... block it on the other side... assuming there is more danger coming from the weak stones around O14.

Having never before played in a turn-based server, it seems like this players have a better level than an equal rating from KGS. Obviously, the amount of time given for each move in both servers isn't as quite as the same, but I still can't imagine a KGS 14k making me suffer like this when playing without handicap. 

Though most people running on Windows won't know anything about qgo, some of you may already know about it: it comes within Ubuntu's default package.
The next version of this program is already under development and it looks like a good tool for online playing. 

General interface:

The general interface is very clean. There are a few icons on the left, which will intuitively guide you to your desired path. You can either play online, create or review sgf files, play against gnu go and configure a few options of the program. Since it's a pre-beta version, the amount of variables which can be modified through the main menu still is somewhat short, but we expect it to grow within the next versions.

In-Game and Graphics

Here you have an image of how the board looks like. As you can see, it resembles the plain 2D version of panda-glgo, which is due to the fact that panda-glgo was actually developed from the first qgo... Well, the stone slate-and-shell graphics and the board are ok, the icons are small compared to other programs, but big enough to not having to worry about it. The upper space could be used to place some of the lateral icons and thus make them bigger

Go Servers:

Here it comes, the big feature of this program: it is able to connect to IGS, WING, LGS, CyberOro, eWeiQi, Tygem and Tom servers. Currently IGS games can be played without any trouble or, at least, I did. Since IGS is among the most used servers, its developer is focusing on improving the IGS experience and thus leaving the other servers as only "watchable". I happened to succesfully watch a few games in Tygem and CyberOro.

Conclusion

QGo2 seems to be a very good tool for people who like moving from one server to another looking for new challenges. It is definitelly going to be an important tool for Unix users, since we don't have many tools so powerful.

Last news: The developer of the program has allowed me to resend you information about compiling and executing the program. If you want to test it, contact me at alejostenuki AT gmail DOT com and I'll send you the instructions.

Last week I happened to lose a game, I was totally beaten. Even I could count the points I had on the board... In order to practise yose a little bit, I asked my opponent if he would mind playing the game till the end, though assuming I had lost.

After a short while, he accepted my request and so we went on playing. We went on playing and I was shown a couple of tesujis I hadn't realised. In the end, my opponent made a invasion in a 4x3 corner, killed my group and shortened my score by a bunch of points. We held a nice conversation about the life-and-death situation of some groups and the whole game. A couple of minutes later, my opponent confessed he had been impressed by my petition and thus, he happily accepted.

I regard that game as the most didactic one in the whole month.

Mental note: Noone is polite, if you are polite, people are more willing to teach you.

As easy as it seems, very few people are following this rule. Though KGS still retains a friendly atmosphere, usually only 5 words take place during the games: hi, gg (stansds for good game), good luck, thx  and bye; going somewhat deeper within the game may come back as a nice reward.

This is a real situation which came up in one of my games:

As you can see, white threatens to make an eye around O4 and around T5. Actually we both thought that white was going to die and so it did during the real game.

W1 tries to move the vital point,  B2 plays in the new vital point, W3 makes an atari at the two black stones, threatening to make an eye at O4. Unfortunatelly, I thought I could play some sort of eye stealing tesuji by playing at Q3 after white plays Q2; having realised it was impossible I had to retreat myself and play at Q1, which happened to be sente and allowed me to play T3, thus removing the eyespace.

Afterwards, during the review, we realised there was a path which would have led white to a secured life... Can you find it?

In fact, it's easier that it seems... so I'll upload the sequence and some variations on the next post

I can't do anything but congratulate Heretix for writing the subs of this game between Lee Chang Ho and Cho Hun Hyun, played in 2002 on the 6th LG Semi-final match, commented by Hua Yi Gang 8-dan.

There are a few interesting variations on the fuseki and the explanation of some unexpected moves by both players.

Here you have the link to the original post: Link to Godiscussions.com

Wouldn't it be great to have more of these videos??