"We don't atari the cutting stone"

Recenty Dwyrin commented in one of his videos "We don’t usually atari the cutting stone but… " and went on to describe the “but” in that situation.

What is the deal with “we don’t usually atari the cutting stone”? This isn’t a principle I have on my radar.

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I’m just a kyu player (7k correspondence only, so maybe rather 10k or something), but I’d think that extending from our weaker stone (or connecting it to another of our stones) would be better than playing atari b/c the latter would most probably create more weakness (= cutting opportunities for the opponent).


(This just straight outta my head without much thinking, I hope stronger players can teach us more.)

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Most situations in which you can atari, you have a cutting point. So when you atari, you make your opponent stronger but you still have the cutting point and have to come back and defend. So usually, you should defend first, that way if they defend then you get sente. If they don’t defend, you can actually just capture later on instead of letting the stone run away.

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Very well explained. I see this as an example of the advice that you should not attack the weak stone (i.e., you “force” your opponent to make it stronger).

– Musash1

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You should absolutely attack the weak stone (usually). The point is to attack it intelligently.

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You atari, your opponent extends, and now what? Can you still capture the stone, even after your opponent has saved it from the atari, or do you need to pull back and cover your own cutting point?

If you need to pull back and cover your own weakness, just fix it BEFORE playing the atari! Usually it’s really bad idea to force your opponent extending and getting stronger, if you can’t continue attacking it properly.

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Thank you, @_KoBa – this is exactly what I mean in my previous post. I’m just not good at expressing it.

– Musash1

Attacking weak stones is a fine thing to do. Attaching to weak stones is usually not something you want to do.

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Just as @_KoBa said.

In practice, I’d say this “principle” holds true half of the time, which makes it basically useless.

It could be helpful when teaching beginners, to fight two bad habits:

  • attach to an existing stone, which feels more reassuring than playing in an open space
  • force the opponent’s next move, which makes you feel more in control of the game (at least for a couple moves)
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Hi, @theHeaT,

You have formulated it perfectly.

Thank you!

You can think about the cross-cut as the shortest possible ladder that doesn’t work. Why would you want to continue playing a ladder that doesn’t work?

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