Alejo's Tenuki

If you keep track of the Full of Surprises blog, you'll have already realised the decline in Korea's Go scene.

The first post related to this topic which amused me was the one called my two teachers, where she talks about how she learnt go and some possible reasons on why children don't learn it nowadays.

Yesterday she wrote a new post: Only a matter of TIME, talking about the differences on time settings among the main go playing countries. It is a like a punch in my stomach to see how time settings are arranged to suit TV broadcasting. Amazing. Obviously, decreasing the time given for each move has dramatic consequences, but you'd better read them by yourself. I really recommend reading this post as I can't really transmit all the fustration and pity you can read between her lines.

Most things don't work as I expected, to start with, I got strongly disappointed with the filtering tool: wide but limited at the same time. It doesn't handle correctly the ranks, as it understands that both 4d and 23k levels are "more than 10k", while you can only filter per one colour rank at one time (so you'll have to set up to filters in order to filter rank for both colours). It doesn't let you filter by player, only by white player or black player, so you have to set up two lines.

As already announced by the developers, the pattern search tool has been disabled, due to the strange results that usually appeared. I'll be looking for this tool... I remember the pattern search thumbnails to be of great use and one of the strongest features of this program.

The counter tool, featuring both Chinese and Japanese rules, isn't very good at calculating the life and death status of stones. Just to make a comparison, the estimation of the result of an specific game I was reviewing when my opponent resigned was in my favor for 2 points; the same estimation made by SmartGo in 2 seconds is that Black wins by 25, due to the dead status of one group. In stonebase, in order to declare one group as dead it has to be completely surrounded (just like in KGS), whenever an unoccupied space is left nearby applying "dead" to that group automatically sets all the territory to the opponent.

On the other hand, the wonderful database manager: You can have all the database categories you want, then load different databases in each, and finally filter the databases for the desired data (black player, event name...). The appearance and versatility of this program is musing, it lets you load lots of board skins which turn it into a colourful experience.

Preloading the games in thumbnails, while would work wonderfully when implemented the pattern search system, is a good tool too: you can check your lasts games with a single glance, if you want to recover a recent game where you played "that pattern" you may want to check among the thumbnails. The Guess next move tool has implemented a new radar system which informs you of the distance between what you said and the actual move.

There are still a lot of menus to explore but I don't have much time recently. My intention was to make a videoreview but I finally decided it is too soon to make a serious analysis of Stonebase. It seems like the developers are capping the product while waiting for something to happen: Thumbnails are available and you can watch them but they are a bit useless without the pattern search engine. The count tool seems to be missing something too...

I have started a small tutorial in English for Stonebase, as I think it would be worth it to have some information about this tool in English. Here is the link: Stonebase in English. Please, feel free to contribute.

A couple of days ago I decided to buy two books I had had in mind for a long time. Being the fuseki and the tesuji my weakest points (I still think I don't have strong points), I bought one of each category. Today in this post I'd like to talk about the tesuji one, the one I've already started devoting: the third volume of the Elementary Go series: Tesuji; written by James Davies and published by Kiseido.

The opinions in GoDiscussions highlight how useful this book is and it has received top marks by most of the reviewers. I happened to find by error an illegal copy on the internet so I could take a look at the book level and the writing style. After a quick glance I realised that the book could work wonderfully for me, so I headed for the library.

The level progression seems to be fine and today I reached page 40. I've got some sort of tesuji saturation in my mind currently, but I already start seeing the results, which is something that encourages me to go on. Where can I see my improvement? I saw it in page 40, precisely in this tsumego I'm going to show you.

White to play

I can tell you I wouldn't have solved this a week ago. I guess I would have probably given up the white group in the corner and moved elsewhere or pushed at Q6 (poor me). Solving this tsumego without any hint, though having done some similar ones previously, helped to raise my moral a little bit this morning. I'd like to see whether I'm able of not to see this tesujis during a real game where noone says "white to live is possible".

I've left the solution in the continue reading section