Capturing Race Exercise 5 / Solution

Which group is dead ?  

The liberty count gives:

• Black: 10 outside liberties and 3 shared liberties
• White: 12 - 4 = 8 big eye liberties and 3 shared liberties.

Considering that in a capturing race between one eye and none, the player with the eye gets the shared liberties, the final tally is Black 10 to White 11.

Black loses in all cases.

Icepick: *boggle* Lo and behold, The Second Book of Go pays off! Reading those capturing race chapters have paid off.

Clearer now?  

If , White takes the entire outside group instead of the two stones.

Gronk: While this explicit method is good to see once concretely (as shown), it is an awfully hard way to evaluate capturing races. The risk of misreading is very high. I strongly recommend RichardHunter's book CountingLibertiesAndWinningCapturingRaces for a thorough treatment of how to count liberties in cases like this (and others).