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Low Knight's Move Approach to Mokuhazushi
I would like to examine the practical experience with mokuhazushi as a background for looking at the different joseki. As a first step I have summarized the historical results as found by searching the Go Games on Disk (May 2002 version) using kombilo. DaveSigaty (Under Construction July 2002)
I ran the search on the otherwise empty quadrant plus one extra line above and to the left. This minimizes but does not completely eliminate continuations that are directly based on the positions to the left or above.
Numerically these are the top 11 continuations where Black plays next. Note that the search position occurs very frequently but that the players very often tenuki from here. Thus there is a big question of whether B plays next (= a mokuhazushi situation) or W plays next (= a komoku situation). We will only look at the 11 plays for B shown.
Statistics:Note: read the following information as (in the case of the first line): Black plays at "q" in 86 cases (9 times immediately on the next move, otherwise with 1 or more moves in between), Black won 40.7% of the games in which this move was played while White won 54.7%. The remainder of 4.6% were cases with no winner = jigo, unfinished, result unknown, etc. Bq: 86 (9), B40.7% - W54.7% For me it is fascinating that only 2 of the continuations for Black have winning records (B's winning percentage is higher than W's): the 1-space low pincer at "c" and the knight's move at "h". The actual experience for all other moves is that W wins more often than B. In particular the taisha joseki (B at "y") has a very clear advantage for W in actual practice. Despite this, the taisha has been the most popular continuation by a fairly wide margin. This is a copy of the living page "Low Knight's Move Approach to Mokuhazushi" at Sensei's Library. (C) the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0. |