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Basic Death Shapes
PageType: Path
Keywords: Life & Death
(more or less obsolete after the WME. See dead eyeshapes and unsettled eyeshapes.) This page illustrates some shapes that are dead as they stand. Call me morbid, but learning to recognize these (and let them go!) is very hard and important for beginners like myself. Note that all of these are dead if the defender is in gote. -- Scartol I'm sure there are others. Please add to the list. Dieter: Senseis have discussed them already at nakade and Almost Fill. But please go on if the existing material is not sufficient. Then we can WikiMasterEdit some day. GijsD: For a slightly different approach, see killable eyeshapes.
The basic critical shape is the Greek cross, and the critical point is the center (marked). Black plays there to live. If White plays there Black dies. From this shape we derive smaller critical shapes: subshapes of the Greek cross that contain the central point and have at least 3 points.
The critical point is still the center of the cross. In addition, we derive two more critical shapes by adding a point to one L of the cross to make it a square. These shapes have 5 and 6 points.
In all of these critical shapes the critical point is the center of the cross. There are other critical shapes in the corner that depend on damezumari (shortage of liberties). -- Bill Spight Knowing these shapes gets useful when trying to kill groups that may appear to be seki - if you can create positions where the taking of the last liberty (and letting the opponent capture) leaves a single eyespace which is one of these dead shapes, the group still dies. The sacrificed group grows from the three stones, then to the pyramid eyespace, to the bulky five, to the rabbitty six. This is a copy of the living page "Basic Death Shapes" at Sensei's Library. ![]() |