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Some Endgame Problem Solution 1
Difficulty: Dan level
Keywords: EndGame, Life & Death
This is the position that was put forward in SomeEndgameProblem1.
Actually B1 happens to work. Important for Black is, after W2 not to play B3, but at 4! If White follows with 3 or 6, Black cuts at 5, if White connects after B4 at 5, Black plays at 3 and achieves a Ko. --TuRen?
Black 1 here also does not work. Again, black does not get much out of his troubles.
The cut at black 1 is tesuji. If white answers at 2, the moves to 5 give black a ko.
If white connects after black 3, she is unconditionally dead.
If white connects at 2, she is dead too.
And if white plays atari with 2, it is ko again (white A is a ko threat, forcing black B)
White's best move is white 2. After this, white is unconditionally alive, but black can capture two stones in sente with black 3. White 6 is necessary because a black stone at the same spot would kill the white group using a snap-back).
Unfortunately, in the game where this position occured (it was in the last round of the preliminaries for the 2001 Dutch Championships, against Marcel Bloemena), I did find black 1, and my opponent did find white 2, but I missed the black move at 6 in the previous diagram, and thus thought it would be gote. To avoid this result, I played the terrible move at 3, expected white A, black B and white C (which would be 1 point better than the previous diagram), but of course my opponent answered at 4, after which I could not capture the two stones at all - not even in gote.
Instead of white 2 in the last two diagrams, the atari here is also possible. As shown before, black plays at 3, but white avoids the ko with white 4. This time it is the other pair of white stones which black captures in sente. Black can still capture the two stones at the top by playing black 5 at 6, but then he will lose sente, so this is worse than this diagram. The final conclusion is that the cut at black 1 allows black to capture two stones in sente, although it is white who can choose which two. -- Andre Engels This is a copy of the living page "Some Endgame Problem Solution 1" at Sensei's Library. (C) the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0. |