Blunder

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A blunder (poka in Japanese) is a mistake of which one feels it is way below one's level. There are two issues:


Dieter

See also


Charles: I think the tennis concept of 'unforced error' is useful, as a comparison.

Velobici: A blunder is a result of Go blindness. A situation in which you fail to see what is thud-simple when pointed out to you.

Warp: I don't know if it qualifies as a blunder per se, but it has happened to me that I have resigned a game which I was winning or at least was extremely close and certainly not decided. The position just looked like I was losing by a huge amount and so hopeless that I lost all hope.

I have certainly learnt that just looking quickly at a game position can be very deceiving and that you should certainly count if you are unsure. It has happened to me the other way around as well: I thought I was winning the game, but when the game was finished, I lost by over 40 points! It was so amazing that I couldn't believe my eyes and for a moment thought there was a bug in the program. I had to explicitly count the points myself, one by one, to convince myself.

Bob McGuigan: Blunders happen to people at all levels of Go playing strength. Fujisawa Shuko, the great Japanese pro, was famous for poka or blunders. He lost the Kisei title to Cho Chikun because of one.

DJ: Could you provide some diagrams? I used to have the 1983 Kido Yearbook (I've lost it now) with the whole game recordings, but I couldn't understand much. Not that today I'm any better, though . . .
Meanwhile I have made a page on Shuko and his brilliancies and his pokas . . .

Bob: Here is the position after 149 moves of [ext] game 7 of the 7th Kisei title match between Cho and Fujisawa.

[Diagram]

Cho(W) vs. Fujisawa(B)



Cho's move 148 was at the marked white stone and Fujisawa responded at the marked black stone. In a commentary in issue 31 of Go World magazine, Cho himself called the marked black stone a silly blunder that loses the game. Instead, playing at B1 in the following diagram was recommended, which would have led to a close game[1], perhaps a half-point decision.

[Diagram]

Cho(W) vs. Fujisawa(B)

If White plays W2, Black easily lives with B5.

The actual game proceeded as follows, with White storming through Black's position.

[Diagram]

Cho(W) vs. Fujisawa(B)




[1] Robert Pauli: It was a close game: W+1.5

axd: rather than soup up read-only discussion space, I'd like to poke here if there is any mentioning on SL of a related aspect: suggesting undo?, because for example you know that your opponent is far better than the blunder (s)he made, because you don't want to win such a victory, have the opponent go banging his/her head against some wall, etc... IMO this doesn't apply for tournament games - unless sportsmanship is one's highest principle. (so this is not a case of asking an undo, but proposing one for a move of the opponent.)

someone once pointed out that this was showing lack of respect (I guess meaning "pointing out the stupidity of the opponent"). Not to me, I see this far deeper: letting a game go down the drain because of some really stupid move is like tennis, where you would overrule (if that exists) a line judge wrongly calling the opponent's ball "out" - even if this would cost you the point. but notice the common denominator here: "sportsmanship".

Tamsin: There's also the situation where a player makes a blundery-looking or misclickish move early on, but which could simply be a a dubious experiment. What do you do? I read once that in the early days of IGS in matches between the strongest players that one would wait for a few seconds or say "?". Is it reasonable to suggest an undo? Or even to say "I've never seen that idea before!"?

axd: Discussing with a colleague go player, he suggests that there is a more fundamental issue (than sportsmanship): a stone, once played, is never removed; which sends such discussions to the academic level. And another issue: what if you suggested an undo because you thought that the opponent was aware of the problem but lost sight of it? If in reality (s)he never saw the problem, the undo suggestion might come as a surprise. In that case, the correct next step (sportsmanshipwise) would be to admit the oversight and not accept the undo proposal...


Poka was the (appropriate) name of an early Go playing program that did no reading, written by Howard Landman.


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This is a copy of the living page "Blunder" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2014 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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