My closest game - review request 25k vs 22k

Hi! I haven’t ever sent a request before here, and figured that this game could be an opportune time.

This game was a lot closer than most of my others - I’m new, and I often find myself falling into the same mistakes, but this example likely has errors that I wouldn’t be able to catch myself, so I was wondering if I could get a review.

Game: https://online-go.com/game/6598388

Ok, so your biggest issue is that you have a lot of wasted an unnecessary moves, two of which did nothing but subtracted points from your total. There are three very important things that would have absolutely won this game for you:

  1. Never play inside your own territory if you don’t have to. it’s a waste of a move at best, and only serves to fill in your own points at worst.

  2. You do not need to capture dead groups. They’re dead and will be removed in scoring. Playing extra moves to do so is a colossal waste.

  3. Don’t worry about saving an unconditionally alive group. This one’s a bit trickier, but if a group is fully connected and has two eyes, nothing your opponent can do can kill it, even if they had infinite moves in a row. Your big group was pretty much unconditionally alive at move 28, and was 100% there by move 43. At that point, since the space is way too small for your opponent to ever make a living group inside it, you should never play another move inside.

I’ll leave a review in a bit with some pointers. You should have won that game based on how it went, but you also had several points where you could have lost by way more if your opponent had noticed the mistake.

Now, this all sounds a bit rough, but don’t lose heart, you’re playing well! I was just pointing out the big issues I saw. I’ll point out good moves in the review. =]

Edit: Here you go! https://online-go.com/review/193290

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