Moved here by Charles Matthews
Dave Sigaty: While looking at the page on the Mark II Kobayashi Formation with GoGoD CD and Kombilo, I was startled to find the information below. It challenges a lot of what I thought I knew about fuseki and the coordination between corners.
Consider the following two side patterns:
See Orthodox Fuseki. Normal considerations of coordination tell us that the shimari on the right coordinates well with the 4-4 stone on the left.
See Mark II Kobayashi Formation. Black lacks a good follow-up move here because the left and right corners do not really coordinate.
But there is a problem with this simple analysis:
Search Results from July 2002 GoGoD CD
Orthodox Fuseki:
Games: 689
Black winning percentage: 51.2
White winning percentage: 48.6
Mark II Kobayashi:
Games: 307
Black winning percentage: 55.0
White winning percentage: 45.0
So why does the pattern that lacks proper coordination have the better winning percentage?
You might think, "Hold on, this is the Kobayashi formation so maybe it the results are biased by his results!" Good thought, here are his results:
Kobayashi Koichi
Orthodox Fuseki:
Games: 27
Black winning percentage: 48.1
White winning percentage: 51.9
Mark II Kobayashi:
Games: 52
Black winning percentage: 53.8
White winning percentage: 46.2
Well, yes he did better with his namesake. But on the other hand he didn't even score as well as the average result for Black. He even managed to drag down the overall results for the Orthodox but played only about 4% of the games.
What about somebody else? Here is another familiar player famous for his "no nonsense" style.
Yi Ch'ang-ho
Orthodox Fuseki:
Games: 29
Black winning percentage: 72.4
White winning percentage: 27.6
Mark II Kobayashi:
Games: 24
Black winning percentage: 79.2
White winning percentage: 20.2
Again we see the same pattern, less coordination makes better results. So dear readers tell me, should I throw away those dusty fuseki books and use the space for my growing manga collection instead? :-)
Charles No, don't do that. Mail them to me ....
In one sentence, my theory. You can play in a less co-ordinated way, but it implies you are going to fight harder.
General discussion on statistics moved to database search.