Aigosumi joseki

  Difficulty: Intermediate   Keywords: Joseki

The aigosumi joseki is one of the discarded joseki, or used to be.

[Diagram]

Kosumi against kosumi

We're talking about this W2. Jowa used it successfully and there are no weaknesses in it. It was played often around 1820, and then dropped out of fashion, possibly because it was too slow. But Chang Hao played it in 2002. One can guess that increases in komi cause trials to be made of discarded joseki, by White.

This pattern can give rise to Kaizen's Heavy Plastering.

[Diagram]

Kosumi as follow-up

W2 is a common way to defend when white+circle is in place. (Another rarely seen joseki move.) It is sometimes used with a stone at a as well. Most occurrences of kosumi against kosumi may not feature this exact configuration, but are related to these examples as most often White has stones along the upper side, many modern examples feature W2 as the border of a framework.


Modern example

[Diagram]

Kong Jie vs Chang Hao (W) - NEC Cup (China), 2004-12-11


Comment (removable later)

In the database it looks like recent occurrences are split between Black and White evenly.


This is a copy of the living page "Aigosumi joseki" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2012 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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