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No Plan In The Opening
Keywords: Problem
In the first article of At your first move(s), please, and by all means, do not have a plan. He says that this is the essence of fuseki. His main argument for this controversial statement is that a predefined plan disregards your opponent and obstructs your flexibility. So, what do the Senseis think ? BillSpight: This is a question I have been thinking about recently. On rec.games.go I passed on to a beginner the advice of chess master and writer E. A. Znosko-Borovski: "It is not a move that you seek, even the best move, but a realizable plan." If people make plans, they will have to use WholeBoardThinking?. But I reflected that, in my play it is not so easy to discern a plan. My style is fairly miai-ish. I tend to make plays that prepare for various alternatives and leave them open. The board can end up looking quite different, depending on my opponent's replies. This does not mean that I do not have a plan, but that it is a very flexible one. :-) And yes, I start planning early. And, Dieter, you should say "other Sensei(s)". :-) (Is it "sensei" or "senseis"? There is no difference between singular and plural in Japanese, but there is in English.) I read that comment and I liked it - and still do - but Pieter's comment left me in dubio. Assume my playing stile is moyo-ish. My plan is to build thickness, and if my opponent comes in, I attack vigourously. I am the Takemyia of Ghent ! But my opponent thwarts my plans, and goes for influence too. There goes my plan. Best of both worlds would probably be. Start with an open mind. Ask yourself which strategies are realizable after the very first moves and reevaluate your plan regularly. --Dieter I am more on the side of the planners. Since Go is a dynamic game, I do not feel comfortable playing a stone without some idea that if my opponent answers with 'a' I intend to play 'b' because... Etc. To me trying to play with no plan at all is simply not feasible. Rather the counterweight to too-rigid planning is to constantly try to remember Von Moltke's famous statement that "No plan survives contact with the enemy." Cho Chikun and Hashimoto Shoji are both famous for spending a lot of time early in their games reading out alternative fuseki strategies. It seems to me that this is something of a luxury when I am blundering through a 1 10 game on a go server! :-) -- DaveSigaty I believe it should read "In the opening have a plan but don't be too attached to it." Or don't just have plan A; have plans B, C, D etc as well. In the opening your opponent will have to cooperate for you to realize your plan. In most cases your opponent will not want to cooperate, so you have to be prepared to alter your plan to deal with their response. In some cases you can use miai to make sure that your plan is realisable; but even then you need to be prepared to do something else if your opponent does something you didn't expect. -- Barry Phease HolIgor: It seems to me that people like to theorize on the opening too much. This happens mostly because a small number of stones on the board. Many people advise to beginners to postpone the study of joseki because it might make them stick to the known patterns in spite of the true understanding of the position. I would advise not to pay much attention to the study of fuseki. If I, IGS 5k*, don't see what could be the implications of a fuseki move (high or low), I doubt if a beginner can see it. When I started to play on IGS my approach to the fuseki was to scatter the stones on the board and then to try to find out which of those stones I want to save and which are going to die and how I can force my partner to pay for those stones. For me the game is decided in the chuban, late chuban very often, the time when the groups die. I know that the better you put your stones in the opening the better are your chances in the fight, but unfortunately I am not able to see what is the significance of the move 24 for what happens at move 146. I guess the the number of games I played during the last 3 years is approaching 1500 (where is my shodan?). I have developed some ideas about the positions that I like to play in and the positions that are difficult for me. Some principles are very useful. One of those is the advise to play first in the region of mutual interest. Another one is to choose a move with two possible continuations (miai). But I don't understand how a person at 15k level can even seriously think about fuseki. I would formulate it even harsher: If there is a person out there that beats you at nine stones the study of fuseki is useless This applies to me at the level of IGS 5k*. Because pros will beat me at 9 stones. This does not apply to Dave, Bill or unkx because nobody beats them at 9 stones. BillSpight: There is a martial arts saying that there are 360 degrees in the martial arts. The point is that everybody is different, and that two people may have diametrically opposite approaches and still each reach mastery. I know that the study of fuseki paid off for me right away. When I was Japanese 4-kyu over 30 years ago -- with inflation, probably Japanese 2-kyu or 1-kyu today --, I knew very few tesuji and almost no life and death. I did not even know the basic dead shapes! What I did know was fuseki, at a fairly high amateur level. I thought a lot about making my stones work and about reducing the efficiency of my opponent's stones. I began to study shape then, and that helped me a lot in that regard. To me it makes perfect sense to study fuseki. After all, those are the big moves. :-) Get the big moves right, and you can get away with mistakes on the smaller moves. OC, large positions can arise in the middle game and end game. In those days, it was rare for me not to have one group die (since I was ignorant of life and death). But even if two of my groups died I often had chances to win, because I had built up such an early lead. I also understood about sacrificing stones, and could often salvage something when losing stones or territory. My path is not for everybody. In fact, I think that it would appeal to very few. And, looking back, I wish that it had not been so lopsided. But it does show the power of the fuseki. I'd have to agree with Bill. Personally I enjoy playing the fuseki more then the rest of the game, and I feel more comfortable with it then other parts of my game. My experiance has been sort of twofold. First of all, if I get ahead in the fuseki, I can afford to play conservatively in the middle game where I am weaker. I often find myself up fifty points after the fuseki, then lose forty in the middle game and come out ten ahead. The other piece is that middle game seems to improve more without study then the fuseki does, which makes study of the fuseki more fruitful then other portions of the game. Principles like extending from a cut tend to be picked up naturally after one does enough fighting. --BlueWyvern 50 points up in the opening? Unbelievable. That would be 2 keima shimari and a hoshi with the opponent passing each time. Look at the ongoing game 2. White played very bad fuseki and yet she is only 20 points behind if playing conservatively. HolIgor
BillSpight: If Blue's opponents are double-digit kyus, it would not surprise me if he often got 50 points ahead in the opening. It could easily be that he is way, way ahead of them in the opening, behind in other areas. Scartol: I hope I'm not overstepping my bounds by posting on something I know so little about. I detest fuseki, mostly because I recognize its immense importance. Fuseki is the reason I gave up chess -- I always felt like I was making a stupid move at the outset that would come back and haunt me later on (Go seems to offer more chances for redemption, heh). As a result, I find myself very nervous during fuseki, but studying it intensely so as to make it easier. BlueWyvern: Disclaimer, my previous statement was made a) when I was playing 20k+ and b) before I had developed a half decent sense of positional judgement. It may not have been 50 points, but suffice it to say, I used to build very sizeable leads in the opening. Not so much any more. This is a copy of the living page "No Plan In The Opening" at Sensei's Library. (C) the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0. |