DDK Travails - 1

 Since I have been following the Li League my regular game reviews in my Heavenly 200 series dropped off rapidly.. I want to return to reviewing my own games but as opposed to the original format want to instead focus on one to three things per game which went wrong (or perhaps right) and what should have been done to improve. This is following the line of reasoning that given a hundred things to improve and nothing will. If you focus on one or two (especially if the cause of the improvement was a loss and 'pain') then slow improvement might be made.

Anyway let's start with a game on 8th May 26 against a 16kyu (from Russia I think). He's been playing since 2024 but seems to have focused on 1.6k! 13*13 in that period and is only just switching to 19*19. This makes a couple of things about his play a little more understandable. He was quite aggressive, like one of those Fox like players who attacks everything - but this might just more due to more 'training' whilst being used to fighting on a smaller board.

The first thing to focus on was a fail on my part (and good play on his) where I failed to trap and kill 11 Black Stones. In game I actually paused at this point and was not convinced on the move I made so some Go instinct did say - 'connect and let him connect at the bottom'. I was greedy though and dropped.

Here is the mistake point and in my head I did consider G4 - but my reading sucks and my instinct should have been followed...

Now even with this play all is not lost and when Black plays E4 I should let those 2 stones go (and allow the trapped stones to live) to instead capture the H2 and H3 stones but what actually happened was he played E4 and I connected, he then dropped (A) and I blocked and when he came in to G2 was when I realised I was 1 stone behind in a capturing race..

The lesson here is to take the connection and kill the easy kill. The bottom 7-8 points by black connecting are not important, but with that Black central group dead my central and left group are alive without any more stones needed.

The second lesson to learn happened much later. Now Black managed to kill my right side as well (apparently it was saveable but I am not good enough yet) and I managed to kill 17 stones on the left top.

It was approaching end game and this situation was in play in the bottom right corner.

Now I should note that Black should likely have played R6 and if I played P6 I would have a double atari that would either re-animate my R8 group or more likely be forced to this

This is not what happened though. I dropped from  the O stone, Black fixed his double atari at P6 allowing me to swing round to N3 to threated the 4 Black stones to the left and Black connected. So here is the current position

Now the AI says it is dead but I was not sure in game (my white group has 4 liberties and Black has 4 as well. Both players then tried to save the group. The actual play was as follows. I attached at L2, Black hane'd M2. I connect at K2 (mistake apparently) Black then made a mistake by extending to N2 (should apparently have played P2 and killed my group) which allowed me to drop to O2 and Block and re-get 4 liberties. Black connected at M3 giving his group 4 liberties and instead of dropping to O1 I blocked at N1 (another counting mistake as when he drops M1 I have to connect and have 3 liberties versus 3 but its Blacks turn) Fortunately Black failed to noticed and played P2 which took a liberty but allowed me to play M1 and my group was connected.

So beyond 'count liberties in a capturing race' which is a fairly standard lesson what I actually wanted to learn is was there a better way to play.

Rolling back to the initial drop to O3 Blacks safety play at P6 was ok and my bend to N3 was also the best local move. Black here should have given up and blocked the corner at P2 but we will allow the connection at M4. The move I should have played was Q2. Now Black can attach at P2 but white can push to P3 and if Black ataris at R2 White plays Q4 and the 6 stones above are dead and 4 white stones re-animated, plus the 4 black stones are still trapped.

Ouch - so the weakness of the upper Black group means that Black cannot risk P2 and the best they can hope for is another capture race

Actually they all lead to nasty capture races that are probably a bit beyond me.

I think the safest would have been a diagonal as in here

That's been fairly heavy work on analysis so I will finish with a general game point. I had felt fairly disheartened when that first 'lesson' occurred but carried on leaning on various groups to see what would happen and the in the end won by 21. So general comment is even if an aggressive player get's a local win you can still pull out victory 

Here is the rolling score potential

You can see I was generally in a lead until lesson 1 (when Black swung to being  in the lead), the peaks and troughs after I fought back elsewhere where lesson 2  and I also grabbed another 6 at the top of the board later as well which is the sudden cliff climb at the end.

End Board