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Thickness attenuation
  Difficulty: Advanced   Keywords: Strategy

Player A has built up thickness in one part of the board. Player B plays so as to blunt the utility of this thickness while player A has not gotten anything of equal value in return. In the process, suppose player A transfers her thickness to another part of the board. If this "second generation" thickness is less useful or less imposing than the original thickness, one might say there has been thickness attenuation.


SnotNose: I've seen this happen in my games. One of the players spends his time transfering his thickness around the board. With each transfer, it becomes less and less useful. In the end, the player has all kinds of thick shapes but nothing to attack and no substantial territory. I think this is common for Black in high handicap games. Especially if the black player has learned enough to make "box shapes" but not learned enough to know how to use those thick walls to attack effectively.

BobMcGuigan: Seems to me that this "attenuation" is a sign of erroneous play rather than a natural occurrence. Sometimes (often?) a thick position, say a wall, gets transferred to a different part of the board where it might appear to have less potential than before but that might be because some benefit came elsewhere during the "transfer". If the over-all balance between thickness, influence, and territory changed then a mistake was made, I think.

SnotNose: Agreed. I think the definition implies that the one whose thickness has been attenuated has played in error. If one has exchanged thickness for something of equal or greater value, then that is not an error. The term seems to describe an affliction that affects those who know how to build thickness but not how to use it (no easy thing!). If I'm not paying attention I can find myself in this situation. I'm playing along thiking, "Okay so you make that thickness useless but here, how about this new thickness...D'oh nothing to attack with it!!! Oops. My thickness has been attenuated."



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(OC) 2003 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.