False seki

  Difficulty: Beginner   Keywords: Life & Death, Go term

Chinese: 假双活 jiǎ shuāng huó

A false seki is a position that looks like a seki but is not, because one player's stones are actually dead. A false seki may be a temporary seki that has collapsed, or it may be a position that arose in killing the dead stones.

Examples:

[Diagram]

Black dies

This example comes from [ext] this Chinese site. After B4, W5 - W9 form a false seki.

[Diagram]

Bent four

Yes, a dead bent four in the corner is a false seki.

(W1 on the 1-1 point lives.)

[Diagram]

black dead



[Diagram]

White is dead, bulky five

B3 @ black+circle


Discussion

Bass: To me these three final diagrams do not seem like examples of false seki. They are plainly dead (we'll talk about the bent four later ;-) ) and I do not think there is any need for a term that means "dead, but somebody once misread it as seki". However, the first diagram displays a "proper" false seki, where there are groups that are locally in a seki, which will however collapse because some of the surrounding stones will get killed. In my opinion, this is a much more useful meaning for the term.


This is a copy of the living page "False seki" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2011 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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