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Positional Judgment
    Keywords: Strategy

If you want to assess whether you will win this game or not, you make a Positional judgment. Basically, this consists of measuring territory and thickness/influence.

Measuring territory is easier in the sense that it is quantifiable, but it requires the mental pain of counting.

Measuring thickness is harder in the sense that it is not quantifiable, but one can develop some kind of intuition for it, which enables one to assess thickness faster than territory.

There is a wonderful book, written by Cho Chikun, on how to make a positional judgment, though it explains the territorial assessment in much more detail than the influence part.

Rob van Zeijst proposes QARTS as a tool for positional judgement and next move selection.

(moved QARTS to a separate page)


Charles Matthews Very often you actually want to make a positional judgement as a guide of what to do (that is, in relation to some current decision). It is also quite common that it is too hard to assign a definite value to some potential territory, or other factor. Therefore the conclusion is quite likely to be 'I need/don't need a deep invasion' or 'I'm winning as long as my opponent only makes 15 points in the centre' or 'I must now make at least 10 points attacking before the endgame starts, so as to avoid being clearly behind'.

During ko fights, too, one has to judge hypothetical positions after large exchanges as won or lost.

In all these cases there may be at least one unknown factor - and of course one hopes no more than that, though it is possible to operate plans like 'make more on the upper side than the opponent makes on the right side'.


Chris Hayashida: I created a positional judgement "problem." Hopefully others can add some as well.



This is a copy of the living page "Positional Judgment" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.