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Whole Board Connection Theory
   

Two of the single-digit kyu players at the Madison (WI) Go club (I won't name names) have been insisting that I -- and other neophytes -- "forget about the goal of the game" (ie, making territory) and instead merely work on keeping all of our stones connected. If this is done, they declare, then our opponent will always lose.

This often leads to a rush of scientific debate, and usually someone breaks out a board and makes that cute little diagram where black has all the points inside the 3rd line, and white has all the points outside of it. Fine, whatever.

I want second and third opinions. I can see some merit in this idea, but it just feels wrong. Maybe it's because I've always heard that territory is the thing, but keeping it all connected feels like a back-door approach. Maybe it does usually work, but it doesn't seem like the kind of strategy I would want to rely on. If one stone is cut off, then, my whole plan is out the window -- and isn't flexibility supposed to be key?

Of course, all of this is still hypothetical in my case, insofar as I've yet to play a game where I can actually keep them all connected.

Scartol

Arno: keeping your stones connected usually is a good advice in high handicap games. After all, white tries to separate and kill black in these games. If this is applicable to even games as well, I don't know. Completely forgetting about territory might be a little bit extreme.

BenShoemaker: I think the benefit of trying to connect all your stones, is that presumably they will all be alive at the end of the game. By this theory, in general, the player with the fewest number of groups will be the winner. My experience fits in with this, but more advanced players may disagree. Perhaps a middle ground would be to try to minimize the number of groups you create, and ensure that they all have plenty of room to live.

GoranSiska: I think you should try to forget about making territory. It is (IMHO) one of the hurdles you need to cross to reach 1d. Here's the idea: play a game or two without ever counting something as your territory. This will allow you to NOT respond to every move your opponent makes and sacrifice even large groups if you judge that rescuing them would make your overall position worse. The thing you should be concentrated in those games is making thick shape and which stones are important globaly not localy. You should think about how you can make your groups safe from further attacks or kikashi and not how you can make an extra point or two with your response. I'm not saying counting or territory doesn't matter, but it may be beneficiary to your growth (:)) to put those concepts and ideas aside for a bit and return to using them after you mastered a few new ones. My 2c anyway...

TakeNGive: It's worth reading Kageyama's opinion, in Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go. He mentions a game with one of his students, who normally took 6 stones handicap. This time the student took 9 stones, saying that he would win by defending them. Kageyama won, and said the reason was he had one big group compared to Black's several small groups.

I think that if you try to connect your handicap stones, you will naturally make large, strong positions. (This doesn't mean 'save every stone', though; often, the best way to connect some stones is by sacrificing less important stones.) If your positions are strong and large, then what's left for White? It is indeed a backdoor approach; but that's one of the wonderful things about go. (I love that proverb, go left to attack right. It reminds me of Aikido practice.)

WilliamNewman: If you're having trouble appreciating how this works, try recording two or three of your games all the way through to the end. (The easy way is to play on the Internet and have the SGF emailed to you.) Then review the games, looking at how many times you were forced to do something because you were getting down to the minimal amount of eyespace you'd need to live. If you had six groups on the board at the end of the game, you had to do this at least six times as much as if you would have if you have one group on the board at the end of the game. It's not easy to estimate how many points you lost for each way your opponent was able to force you, but maybe you can guess within a factor of two. Now look at the moves you made where you had a choice between local territory and global connection, and you went for local territory. Estimate their total value the same way. You may find that the total cost of unconnectedness was greater than the benefit of greediness. (And if you're having this argument with a 1kyu, you are at least very likely to find that the total cost of unconnectedness is greater than you realized. The benefits of grabbing territory are visible immediately. The costs of unconnectedness are often delayed by a hundred moves from the decisions which caused them, and so are relatively easy to underestimate.)


Bill Spight: I usually think of connection from the flip side: Divide and conquer!
Bruce Wilcox's sector line idea is related. It is a good idea to cut sector lines, thereby preventing or at least hindering the opponent's connections. I have heard that Bruce's teachings have helped even single-digit kyu players (AGA) advance several stones in a very short time. :-)
Takagawa wrote that go is a game of territory, but it is almost impossible to make territory. ;-) Kitani pointed out that, even when a player has "territory" (a fairly secure area), the opponent usually has an effective play inside it. Takagawa said that actual territory arises from contact fights. He advised thinking on a large scale, letting the territory develop naturally.


Scartol: Thanks for the advice, everyone. I've come to recognize "Keep all your stones connected" as valuable advice, but not an ironclad law. And, as if to prove myself right, the gods sent me on a 6-handicap game this evening in which I was able to keep everything connected, and still lost. The end result looked like this:

[Diagram]
Diag.: Everything's connected! W+13.5


This is a copy of the living page "Whole Board Connection Theory" at Sensei's Library.
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