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Kikashi
  Difficulty: Beginner   Keywords: EndGame, Tactics, Go term

There are some moves on the board that have to be answered by the opponent, otherwise a local position would crumble. These moves are called forcing moves or kikashi. Playing these moves usually gives some positional advantages to the forcing side, but a ko threat is lost as the result. It also often happens that playing a kikashi which does not gain enough profit is actually AjiKeshi.

[Diagram]
Diag.: Black 1 is a kikashi.

White has to answer at 2 or a in order to live in the corner

Kikashi stones should be considered lightly in many cases and sacrificed if their defence makes the formation too Heavy.

Sometimes weaker players play moves which they consider kikashi, but which are actually a ThankYouMove. This should be avoided.



DieterVerhofstadt (1k) writes: Black 1 in the above diagram is not an example of kikashi, but an example of local sente. There is an important difference between kikashi and sente, and once again, I don't want to affirm here that I understand it. Here is an attempt to distinguish between kikashi and sente:

Kikashi or forcing moves , are moves that are played in order to force the opponent to answer in a certain way. The kikashi stones don't achieve a local advantage, but are meant to serve later purposes. If the opponent answers in the expected way - submissively - and tries to capture them later, they are often sacrificed, as they have already served their purpose.

Sente moves are moves that require an answer, if the opponent doesn't want to suffer a local defeat. The difference with kikashi moves, is that sente moves do achieve a local goal and that they should not be sacrificed if you don't want that local achievement go to waste.

Some examples:

[Diagram]
Diag.: Kikashi

Black 1 is a nozoki, a typical example of a kikashi. Due to his marked TigerShape, white is already connected, and there is hardly any aji left in this position. So Black's move is justified: he forces White to confirm the choice she already made: connect her stones.

Black 1 does several things at a time: it destroys some eye shape, and it can serve as a ladder breaker later, or be a stone that is just in the right spot to win a semeai. But Black 1 is a stone to be treated lightly. It is not an important stone. It is a kikashi.


[Diagram]
Diag.: Sente

From the same diagram, we see that White can also play nozoki at Black's marked TigerShape. This move is sente : it also forces the opponent to answer, but it has a local achievement too. White 1 enhances the strength of the White wall, and should by no means be sacrified, since that would imply the sacrifice of the whole wall !


[Diagram]
Diag.: More kikashi

Suppose White is ahead in territory but Black has more influence. With 1 and 3, White forces Black to take some territory at the top. After his submissive answers, she jumps to 5. Her stones 1, 3 and 5, will have some influence on the proceedings in the center. If Black makes an attempt to capture 1 and 3, they should be sacrificed in order to strengthen 5.



It may be useful to illustrate the difference between a local sente move, a kikashi and a YosuMiru. If we define kikashi in general by a move which forces an answer, then a local sente move and a yosu miru are just different ends of the spectrum, so to speak. But it seems that a kikashi, in addition to 'forcing an answer' is also often used to describe a move which is ready to be sacrificed, which is played outside the normal line of play, answered and then left alone. As such, a kikashi is much more 'speculative' then a local sente move or a yosu-miru.

Of course, the distinction between kikashi and ThankYouMoves is another subject, and not always easy to make :-)

--MortenPahle


In Strategic Concepts of Go, Nagahara defines kikashi as follows:

"A kikashi is a forcing move played to produce an effect. That is, a kikashi is a play which must be answered, usually in just one way, the exchange of the kikashi and the answer being useful in some way to the player of the kikashi. The terms kikashi and sente may seem to have the same meaning, but kikashi is applied to moves which are more or less incidental to the main flow of play. Once played, kikashi stones can typically be abandoned without any great loss."

See also KikashiAndInfluence


BillSpight: Just a linguistic note.

From a linguist's or lexicographer's point of view, words typically have more than one meaning. I can identify three main senses of sente, for instance. This point of view is descriptive: how do people actually use the word?

There is also a prescriptive point of view: How should people use the word? There is not always agreement on this, of course, or else people would use the word as they should. ;-) From a technical point of view, it is nice to make a clear distinction between synonyms, so that they do not overlap. One may then prescribe a meaning for a technical term that is narrower than common usage.

In the case of sente and kikashi I think that there is plainly an overlap in common usage, rather than a clear distinction. (And this does not bother me. :-)) It is a question of nuance.

[Diagram]
Diag.: Sente vs. kikashi

In this diagram I think that most Japanese go players would describe the plays, B 1 and W 4 as kikashi and sente, respectively. If asked if B 1 was sente, they would say of course. If asked if W 4 was kikashi, they would say yes, but. It sounds a little funny.

However, they would later call the Black stone at 1 a kikashi stone, but would not call the White stone at 4 a kikashi stone. A kikashi stone is one you can easily throw away.

I'm not living in Japan, now. Maybe DaveSigaty would like to check my sense of usage.



DaveSigaty: I can not clarify the actual usage. I would like to blame my Japanese ability but I suspect that also my general conversations about Go do not rise to the necessary heights :-)

I think that the following is very interesting. It is from Brian Chandler's "Translator's Notes and Terminology" at the beginning of Beyond Forcing Moves:

"As I was browsing in the Nihon Ki-in bookshop one day the Japanese subtitle of this book caught my eye. It is simply kiki kikashi. The obvious translation, though not a very helpful one, is simply Forcing Moves and Forcing Moves. The first term kiki refers simply to moves which force a particular reply. Although kikashi is also translated as 'forcing move' a nuance is lost by translating this word the same way.
To clarify the difference, it may be enlightening to look at the original Japanese terms. Kiki and kikashi are the noun forms of the verbs kiku and kikasu respectively. In normal usage kiku means simply 'work' or 'take effect', in the sense that aspirin 'works' for a headache. Kikasu is the causative form of the same verb ('cause to work'), and in ordinary language it is hard to attach any particular meaning to it. In other words, a native speaker of Japanese knowing nothing of Go would not understand its meaning immediately. This suggests that a special term is in order in English, too.
There is a third grammatical variant of the same basic word, which is kikasare, or very literally 'suffering by being caused to work'. Basically this is the passive form of kikashi, so it means that you have let your opponent gain some kikashi value against you.
Here is my attempt to define these three concepts, together with a list of some of the terms you may find used for them.
kiki - a move which the opponent must answer in a particular way; a move which forces a reply; a move which is sente against some stones, or threatens to live/kill; leverage. ('Leverage' is my own coinage, and it is intended to be more or less self-explanatory. The aji in your opponent's stones is the raw material against which 'leverage' acts; conversely, thickness is the property of stones against which you can get no leverage.)
kikashi - a move which exploits an opponent's forced response to provide some gain.
kikasare - letting the opponent make an effective kikashi against you. I have used 'being kikashi'd' (being forced; playing submissively) in this book. It is not an expression I think particularly elegant, not the least because I am not sure how to spell the past participle of the verb 'to kikashi', but I hope that it gives slightly more of a hint as to what is going on."

In addition to the help with the meaning of kikashi, I also like this for the definition of thickness which is different from (and I think more subtle than) the way I have thought about it up to now.


Very interesting. :-)

Thanks, Dave.

--Bill




This is a copy of the living page "Kikashi" at Sensei's Library.
(C) the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.