Oh, this is a very good game to look at. Much better than the previous ones. Swings back and forth, post more games like this.
Here it’s indeed normal to go into 3-3, in line with the idea that corner better than center. But if we choose to jump out into the center, then what we’re doing is splitting black into two parts on the left and the right. If black reinforces one side, you should harass the other side, and if black reinforces the other, you lean, attack the other.
In the game it looked a little as if black managed to reinforce both sides while white where going into the center not receiving any points.
I like this one from black, giving up two stones to enclose the side is clever:
After it, at this point white can look at their center group:
White has an eye A for sure, it looks a lot like the second eye around B. But even if it’s not, white can run C towards friendly stones. So we can conclude white doesn’t need to be reinforced anymore, and we can tenuki, for example to bottom-right.
Next white built a partition here:
It’s not a very good deal for white. Because black encloses a lot of points on the side, and in the corner, when white encloses just a little in the center. Black fixed the weaknesses for free. Or in other words, white helped black to fix the weaknesses.
Because without these moves, black stones are high 3 spaces apart and white can think of meddling there, in various ways, like A, B, C, and maybe black won’t have anything there.
Here, fixing solidly is better:
Because it doesn’t give black to atari at A. Fixing solidly in general is nice because you leave less weaknesses and free ataries/peeps for opponent.
Yeah, you didn’t notice that you can be separated.
Here you typically want to extend because if you take, opponents gets free atari.
Hit you right on the nose:
You did nice to enclose the side though. Just be careful with those cutting points:
Sometimes it’s correct to let the opponent have a little more but with better shape on your side. This is why AI looks even at fixing directly like this:
In the corner you’re strong, so the tsumego principle to use here is reducing eye shape (from outside). You cramp opponent so much they don’t have enough intersections to make two eyes.
You play 1 and 3 pressing them into the corner and black would block otherwise white just crawls in their wannabe living space. And boom, six in the corner is not living shape. That’s the idea. Throwing stones into the inside hoping it’ll turn into a dead shape is a wrong approach, I think. Unless it works.
After this white is routed and in panic.
Here black has two eyes already and white is alive too, of course. So they should take care of the border there instead of playing moves that get couple of points.
I’m surprised white didn’t try to do the same to black. Look at that space in top right.
Winning move, nice. See, when playing equal opponents, you suddenly don’t die as much.
I end up with surrounded dead groups a lot lately.
