White to make a ko, seki, or ten-thousand year ko.
This instruction is so unclear…
2 Likes
Yes, well… I’m still trying to figure it out myself 
I guess I could suggest in the instructions that you try to solve it all three ways.
1 Like
I didn’t see it explicitly covered in the thread yet; however, these “unsettled eyeshapes” are basic, but essential:
Not much to say about them, besides each can die or live depending on which player plays on the key point (marked with triangle in the above diagram)
The play inside is sometimes called Nakade (J-nakade (中手), C-dian yan (点眼), K-치중 (置中)), meaning “play in the center/eye”. The shapes have fun names in English too (see the SL link below)
Further reading
- Sensei’s Library: Nakade and Unsettled Eyeshapes
- KBA Baduk Terms: Play Inside
- 点眼_百度百科
- Cho Chikun’s Go: A Complete Introduction To the Game, Chapter 8: Life and Death - Placement Moves
5 Likes
I spent some time analyzing this one. Puzzle link: Long L+1 group, to kill.
I was trying to explore all the ways to kill it, and also all the interesting failures. Here’s where I am so far.
White to kill
- The simplest move is
(bottom hane). - The moves at
do not work. (See example below.) - The clamp
is a more complicated option.
Sensei’s only shows the blue move. I’m curious about how obvious (or well-known?) these moves are to everyone. Like is it easy for you to read out that the top hane doesn’t work but the clamp does?
My approach is to try lots of variations in the puzzle editor, marking the resolved endpoints as correct/incorrect and then pruning irrelevant branches as appropriate. But even when I think I’ve gotten to an endpoint, like this:
…I might later realize I missed something complicated like the snapback.
For this particular one I had A7 and A8 marked as working, but then I set up Katrain to check my work and discovered that I was wrong. For A8 I had missed another snapback, and for A7 I had actually found the path for Black to win but got confused by all the variations and marked it incorrectly in the puzzle.
2 Likes
I think it’s a mixture of memory and reading honestly.
Hane
- block seems like the first response to read,
- that forces the 1-2 point to prevent the tigers mouth like shape and living
- then a7 tries to make miai between an eye at A5 and living with B8,
but that sort of idea comes to mind when you can visualise
the shortage of liberties.
Some of that really is a kind of memory, if not of the specific positions then just of that kind of tactic.
And I think this is why I’ve seen the recommendation be to begin to memorise these common shapes and their most common variations like in
They are complicated enough, and common enough that you should know the main lines at least so you can quickly play them in a game, otherwise you can sink a lot of time into them or make a mistake in byoyomi.
3 Likes