![[Welcome to Sensei's Library!]](images/stone-hello.png "Sensei's Library")
The fourth sentence is confusing me. Shouldn't it be
"It is a mistake to have too many low stones: they are good for building eye space, but the third line isn't good for taking serious territory. "?
If really the second line was concerned, we'd better write "... to have too many very low stones ...", but wouldn't such a statement rather belong to Very Low?, anyway?
I think the author probably meant that third line stones take two lines of territory, which isn't enough. But yes, the phrasing is confusing. It should say that it's a mistake to have too many stones on the third line. That in itself is a teensy bit controversial, however, since how many is too many depends on what country you're from. Koreans are much more fond of the third line than the Japanese.
Is that really so, or is this "Koreans fond of territory" thing becoming some kind of global legend? I haven't studied the difference between Korean and Japanese Go in detail, so I have to rely on what others say, but the games I have studied, did not suggest a strong bias for territory. From what I read, I think that Koreans have taken the game to another level of reading, calculation and positional judgment. They play more moves that are seemingly bad style, or overplay, because they know it gives points and little damage to the safety of their groups. Actually I think the emphasis in Korean Baduk is fundamentally on the health of stones. By analyzing the status of groups very deeply, they become better at knowing when an apparent attack can be ignored.
In the very first version of this page (by Charles Matthews), there was no clear distinction of "low" and "very low" made yet. Of course, the second line is even much worse to built territory than the third, hence that statement isn't too contradictious in that context.
However, looking at the more precisely worded page as it is now, I think that, at least, "second" should be changed to "third". Are there any objections? Supposedly, it would be even better to explain the differences in some more detail.
I can't say I agree with the criticism of the page. Low is a broad term, and I found the broad explanation both suitable and adequate. I added in a simple diagram, perhaps if we switch that to a couple of 13*13 boards we can illustrate low vs very low?
Are we seriously contemplating defining low as on the third line and very low as on the second? Don't we have enough jargon?
In the discussion of balance, low means below the fourth line. A couple of hundred years ago, go players were not concerned with balance. But then they began to discover how to exploit positions that were too low overall. For the purposes of that discussion we really do not need to distinguish the second line from the third. For other discussions, we can say second line or third line, can't we?