I’m going through James Davies’ Life and Death book and have a question about Problem 1 from Chapter 7 (two-space notchers). The question asks the status of the group. The answer is given that black can live if playing first, and white can kill if playing first. The answer shows black to live if plays at “A”. However, I can’t see why playing at the marked triangle doesn’t also work. To be clear, I placed the black piece with triangle and think it should make the group alive. Can someone prove me wrong? I’ve embedded the picture and sgf file. Thanks!!
The triangle move is totally fine if you are just trying to live. However, in an actual game, it’s always better to live as big as possible. Move A allows black to live bigger. Not only that, it also threatens white as it makes the cut more severe. If white answers, then black lives in sente.
Okay, that makes sense. The author mentions that about a couple other problems in the book so far (i.e., playing a better living move on outside with more potential). Thanks for confirming! Some of these problems are quite a struggle for me and take a while to work through. It’s a small book, but it’s slow going
Yeah, I definitely don’t do more than one chapter per day from this one. Sometimes a chapter every two days. I have Tesuji from the same series and it looks more interesting (varied), but I’ve heard it’s a bit harder, so I’m just going to go through this first and supplement with more varied tsumego from the Graded Go Problems series.
Tesuji has only one chapter difficult, the introduction. That one you can just read it like a story. After that it’s all not that difficult stuff that you can search by yourself. Great book.
Re: Tesuji. The problems at the end of each chapter are not so easy for a DDK. I needed to work on the book three times some years ago. But when I was 12k, I was so happy to setup a double ladder against a 1k in a tournament game, even if I didn’t manage to win in the end.
