Why/When to use High Pincers in the Opening

I’ve recently been trying to expand my opening joseki knowledge beyond standard patterns and the occasional 1-space low pincer.

I’ve noticed that, not only do I never use high pincers in the opening, I have no idea when they are appropriate to use…

Surprisingly, it took until 8k to see one used against me in a real game, and my opening suffered as I had no idea how to respond…

Does anyone have any insight or examples to help me in this area (video suggestions, demo boards, pro games to look at, etc.)? Also, which high pincer joseki should I focus on learning first?

How do you decide with a low pincer how to respond?

Hi, Swabby8. That’s a very interesting question though I think it doesn’t have an answer. In many situations you can’t tell which pincer is better and just play according to your liking. Even if there is a diference it is usually worth only a couple of points. The positions where the choice between high and low pincer can be game deciding are extremely rare.

You can find some discussion at SL http://senseis.xmp.net/?HighVsLowPincer.

The most popular high pincers are two space ones so you can probaly focus on them first:
http://senseis.xmp.net/?PincerNomenclature#02. Some of the joseki are very complicate. Some of them were played in recent AlphaGo games and will probably be trendy for a while.

The examples from the pro games can be found here http://weiqi.tools/. Use pattern search to find the joseki you are interested in.

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Mainly if you want influence. That’s the difference between playing 3rd and 4th line. No difference for pincers in general.