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Capturing
    Keywords: Tactics

It becomes obvious after a few games of go that knowing how to capture isn't something very deep. It amounts to the rule of capture, plus the three basic points: that diagonal adjacency isn't connection, capture is legal when playing into a captured position, and ko.

That tells you little enough about what to capture, and how to put yourself in a position to capture directly.

There are first of all a number of teaching issues that are elementary from a technical point of view:

  1. capture go, what it tells you about the game and what it doesn't (stones not worth capturing, wasting plays taking stones off, throw in tactics and so on);
  2. dead stones;
  3. defective and successful nets, tactical break-outs;
  4. taxonomy of nets (this is a neglected area);
  5. when you have actually escaped;
  6. the five liberties heuristic (five liberties comments);
  7. accurate understanding of ladder-breakers including bending ladders, breaking two ladders;
  8. ladder and loose ladder problems;
  9. capturing races.

Teaching to adults usually doesn't emphasise deep study of these topics at an early stage (Korean material for schools puts much weight on capture, by way of examples and drill). Of course two eyes also matters greatly; and life and death is initially more interesting too, both technically and because it interlocks with the territory concept.

One can contrast those basic ideas on capture with a list of 'conceptual' approaches:

  1. sacrifice;
  2. squeeze;
  3. disposable stones and key stones;
  4. cutting stones and strategy around them;
  5. trying too hard to capture, amarigatachi;
  6. light play, e.g. screening kikashi;
  7. giving up stones, pushing in from outside;
  8. semedori

To go even further one can try to assimilate the points made in Killer of Go, about greed, tewari in particular.

Charles Matthews



This is a copy of the living page "Capturing" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2003 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.