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Shicho
Difficulty: Beginner
Keywords: Tesuji, Go term
A shicho (English term 'ladder') is a technique of of capturing stones. Black 1 starts a shicho (ladder) to capture the marked white stone.
If white tries to escape, black can at each time play atari and white will be captured.
One thing that is important regarding shicho is that they may span a large part of the board. If for example black captures the white stone in a shicho with 1, the shicho goes all over the board if white tries to escape, resulting in the next diagram.
If white tries to escape, the shicho will go on in this way. Of course, as it stands, this is a disaster for white. But if there would have been a white stone at A, white could now capture a stone and would stand to capture more because of all the double ataris that white can play. Such a stone which stops a shicho from working is called a 'shicho-atari' (English term 'ladder breaker').
A simple technique for reading shicho is to see 6 diagonal lines from the start of the shicho. Unfortunately SL does not permit me to draw lines, so I have to make do with marking all the points instead. Except for 'a', 'b' and 'c', any black stone (only) on the marked points will make a shicho-atari. However, if there are both black and white stones on the marked points, please read the shicho manually. It's not that hard either. (Remark by Dieter: Kageyama says: No shortcuts. Read the ladder. Always. See also: PracticingReadingOutLadders)
Why is a black stone at 'a' in the previous diagram (the marked stone here) not a shicho-atari?
This diagram shows why - at the second line, white can play at 5 instead of 'd' in the diagram, rendering the marked black stone useless. The reader might want to figure out why having a black stone in 'b' or 'c' in that diagram doesn't make a shicho-atari. Besides, note that the shicho-atari points I have marked doesn't include the points in the first line. Go and figure which of these points make shicho-ataris, and which are not. --unkx80 See also:
This is a copy of the living page "Shicho" at Sensei's Library. (C) the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0. |