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A Debate Worth Having
  Difficulty: Advanced   Keywords: Opening

While we are paying attention to the opening plays, it is only right to point out that many authorities advise against placing excessive weight on them. For the most part amateur games are decided much later in the fighting; and improvement in the middle and end phases pays more immediate dividends. Certainly studying the corner openings by themselves is a dubious plan of action for most players.

Another point to make is that discussion of openings can take on a negative tone. Finding fault with plays that are well short of game-losing mistakes can seem overzealous. Where a player explains that a choice of variation was designed to lead into a familiar or comfortable type of position, that can be seen to be a valid way of setting about things, a gambit perhaps trading a current loss of a few points for future practical prospects.

What can be said on the other side is that these arguments may be pressed too far. There is the question of ‘content’ of games, looking beyond the result alone.

Denial of content is naturally a very serious attack on the reasons to play. Go players are fortunate that games which become fights typically do not do so in an indiscriminate way. Fighting may indeed snowball, taking on a momentum that gathers in issues and generates effects in parts of the board remote from the original bone of contention. That puts to the test the dispositions of forces from the early plays of the game.

In fact starting with an empty board throws each player temporarily into a realm of purified responsibility for the game. What is actually happening is hard to address in explicit language. If only briefly, metaphors of direction, dynamics, planning and pressure may take over as a description.

To players these metaphors are far from dead. It may be that they draw sustenance from what is to come, but the relationship with the middlegame is symbiotic. The opening shapes the fighting, whilst apparently minor decisions in the opening are often charged with full significance when the warfare becomes all-out.

A distinguished visitor to the Cambridge club in 1999 was Susumu Kanetake, who was at the time writing on T.E. Hulme, an influential critic from the first decades of the twentieth century. Hulme tended to use games as a simile alongside algebra and worn-down coinage, when explaining how common expressions become devalued, and speech becomes a ‘mere’ formal exchange.

Games players would take this as unfair; but to argue that convincingly the roots of content must be allowed their importance.

Charles Matthews


From the Trigantius archives.



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