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High-concept opening myth
    Keywords: Opening

Charles Matthews I'll admit to becoming in a minor way distraught, once in a while, at the prevalence of sanrensei and Chinese fuseki talk when it comes to opening theory discussion. This can be both a matter of taste - I don't play either type of opening myself at all frequently - and slightly irrational on my part.

I call these 'high-concept' openings by analogy with the Hollywood 'high-concept' film, where the plot has to be easily understood by a seven-year-old. So the first comment I have is that 'go isn't like that'.[1]

To qualify that a little: you can't win simply by playing on one side of the board. A fifty-point side isn't enough to win. No, really, it isn't: you may think that playing five stones on one side and taking 57 points is great, but your positional judgement is then wrong.

A somewhat more sophisticated version of the same story is that these are omoyo strategies. Black sets out to expand from one side of the board into such a large-scale framework that White cannot cope.

This way of looking at it has more substance. If Black and White play for competing frameworks, Black has the advantage because Black starts, That's undeniable. White has komi, though. Therefore in a sense Black must play on a larger scale than White, if the board is simply dividing into two huge competing areas. Relying on one framework is called ippoji and it's wrong-headed. No, really, you may be reading this and thinking 'the man has never heard of Takemiya'. There's only one Takemiya - accept no substitutes. I have met Takemiya and the man is talented. J.S. Bach didn't need to read books on harmony, Takemiya doesn't need to be told that a large-scale strategy isn't a robust plan unless it has something innately a bit special about it.

A third aspect is that one can standardise one's opening strategy to 'I always play the High Chinese', and leave it at that. Whatever the competitive advantages (and they rely in part on the opponent's ignorance) this is a dull thing to do to one's go. There are a huge number of interesting openings to think about, and one virtue of SL is that here we begin to look at many aspects of them in a discursive way. My experience, sadly, is that this discourse gets blocked up if, for example in the case of nirensei, people say 'how do you play against sanrensei?' as if it were the key question. If I could get their attention for long enough, I'd like to answer along the lines of:

  • You do realise that White can choose a formation that makes sanrensei by Black not a great opening?
  • You do realise that the techniques for playing inside a sanrensei framework are really just 'normal middlegame joseki'?
  • Aren't you glad when your opponent plays an ippoji strategy that is more intimidating than sound?

It's perfectly true that some players will make a sanrensei or Chinese formation out of obstinacy even when it's not a perfect choice, by pro standards. It's quite true that, last time I looked at the Go Teaching Ladder games, a high proportion did adopt one of the said openings; and opening books in English don't cover so much else. In a martial art, it seems to me, this all would be assuming that there isn't a way to side-step a well-telegraphed and very committal attack. I find that hard to believe. As I said before, my feeling for go is that it isn't like that.


[1] Bill: Mild dissenting comment. In reading some of Go Seigen's recent books, I have been struck by how often he appeals to the idea of Black's playing in a way that is easy to understand. If it were anybody but Go Seigen, I might think, "Well, he's an old man living in the pre-komi past." But who understands go better than he?
Anyway, I think that SanRenSei and the Chinese Openings fall into the easy for Black to understand category.

Charles Didn't mean that Go Seigen wanted to play them, of course - a nirensei man for 25 years. Those books are some of the best fuseki material of recent times; in comparison the new Kato book on the Chinese seems a disappointment. There are some good volumes put out by Ai Books, for example those by Otake in a pair 'Fuseki with Black', 'Fuseki with White', and the examples in the first of those give a much richer diet.



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