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speculative invasion
Path: BadHabits   · Prev: SlidingStonesOnTheBoard   · Next: StubbornPlay
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  Difficulty: Beginner   Keywords: EndGame

A favourite activity for beginners, social players, and weaker club players is to invade the opponent's territory quite near the end of the game, for no particular plan or reason.

This mostly wastes time, and the opponent's patience; and is certainly a bad habit. Of course there may well be a valid invasion. If not, you waste ko threats, and possibly points (by not reading properly, you can easily play gote moves).

This is really the small-scale version of the mochikomi mistake. Valid invasions can often be played rather earlier than the small endgame plays. Naturally that isn't always the case, in that shortage of liberties and cutting points are created by plays right up to the end of the game.

Charles Matthews

HolIgor: Despite many objections, I think that the beginners must try everything to learn what could work and what could not. At the same time the opponents learns to defend. Eventually, some reading depth is developped as well as some notion of what are the weaknesses that needs to be protected.

And this helps a lot later when you play yose in more serious games. One of the most difficult problems is whether to spend one more move defending or go for points elsewhere. Sometimes even O Meien does not read that properly. Weaker players tend to add stones for safety allowing opponents to keep sente. I think that it is better to practice a little bit while you are inexperienced yet. Later it would be a shame.

Tristan Jones Good points, HolIgor, but may I ask why you cite O Meien in particular? (He's my favourite player and I won't hear a bad word said about him <grin>.)

DaveSigaty: If I am not mistaken, HolIgor is making a subtle reference to Ladder Exercise 2 :-)

Tristan Jones A-hah! But didn't he do well to come back from such a disaster and capture the 2000 Honinbo title :-)



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