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Intermediate play - side example
Keywords: Opening, Strategy
Material here combined from probe and intermediate plays pages. Charles Alain: The attachment under the small low enclosure is often given as an example of a probe move. Here is another one which, I hope, will make the concept clearer.
If White plays at
If White plays the large low extension, Black plays this variation of the joseki and, again, Charles Matthews Variation 2 may have been taught to us; but in current pro practice Black invades the corner at b immediately, for a quite different kind of result.
White cutsSilly me, but what happens when White cuts? You could answer that Black can treat the stones lightly, but that's a fairly large gain for White locally anyway with the corner now secured. That's the only thing keeping me from studying and using this probe. -- lavalyn I have tried working on that in 3-4 point high approach, inside contact, tenuki variation. A problem might be that it's too high-level, I don't know about that. - Andre Engels
Charles Matthews This has happened at least three times in pro games: in a game Cho Chikun-Tozawa Akinobu 1977-05-26, and in games of Cho Hun-hyeon as Black. In each case I've seen, Black plays What happens if White cuts?
It's not clear to me that answering the approach in the upper left is better for White than this (which is almost certainly not best play for either side, but looks distinctly plausible at my level (8 kyu)). As such, I'm not sure that the low approach is really a forcing move - a probe, yes, but...
Is there some reason the pros invariably answer (at In Andrew's diagram the good style play for Black is b rather than anything else, in the upper left. But it is often better to do nothing at all in an unsettled position.
To try to answer Andrew's question (as corrected by me): this is an orthodox position, and White at Bill Spight: I think that Andrew's suggestion has merit. The cut seems playable to me. We can get there by an alternate route:
The enclosure at Charles Matthews Sure, the cut is playable - made in a number of pro games. Andre Engels: From my collection: Position occurs 193 times, amongst which white plays some kind of answer down the upper left 121 times, pincered the black stone 20 times, plays around the middle of the left side 13 times and cuts 4 times. If we extend the search by disregarding the right half of the board, the numbers get to 405 occurences, with 323 extensions in the upper left, 45 pincers, 23 plays around the middle of the left side, 10 cuts and 4 times where white plays on the right and black gets the next move in this area. This is a copy of the living page "Intermediate play - side example" at Sensei's Library. ![]() |