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Five liberties comments
Path: GiveMeLiberties · Prev: FiveLibertiesForTacticalStability · Next: TheEmptyTriangleIsBad
Difficulty: Beginner
Keywords: Tactics
One idea of Wilcox's that I have found useful is that you do not have to worry about shortage of liberties of a group that has at least five liberties. It is not something that I had used as a guide, but now when a group has only four liberties I check the tactical situation. Recently I watched a game in which a Japanese 6 dan made a mistake by reducing his own liberties to four by answering a ko threat. A neighboring group was loosely connected to the one with four liberties, and that group had only two liberties. By throwing in a stone, his opponent made the connection cost two liberties to the first group, yielding a combined group with only two liberties. Then came the devastating atari. Wilcox's dictum (EZGO) that a group with five liberties is safe from shortage of liberties is therefore wrong. For instance, by adding another loosely connected group to the example above the danger comes when the first group has six liberties. But the converse is true. Any group with fewer than five liberties should be checked for shortage of liberties, as a matter of course, and one should be wary of reducing one's liberties to four. A strong tactician has no need for such advice, but it can help the rest of us avoid blunders. Path: GiveMeLiberties · Prev: FiveLibertiesForTacticalStability · Next: TheEmptyTriangleIsBad This is a copy of the living page "Five liberties comments" at Sensei's Library. ![]() |