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Bad shape
Path: Mistake · Prev: AutomaticPlay · Next: BadStyle PageType: HomePage
Keywords: Go term
BadShape - The Go TermGeneral term for a shape such as a dango, emptytriangle etc. that fails to work well because it is inefficient, or suffers from shortage of liberties, has too many cutting points, too little eye shape, and so on. It is particularly problematic earlier on in the game, as it gives the opponent weaknesses to aim at. Often a tesuji exists to exploit the weakness(es) of bad shape. BadShape - The PlayerI was christened "BadShape" by my go teacher and mentor because I had a tendancy to play to the limit of my reading, to try too hard to squeeze the most from the stones. Whilst this shows good fighting spirit, it resulted in my relying too much on sequences that just happened to work when I played them but went spectacularly wrong later. I was cured of my excessive badshape by reading James Davies' excellent "Attack and Defence" as about 7 kyu and learnt not to bother to try to read complicated sequences; if it was hard to read, I assumed something would go wrong later and so I played a simpler move. This was more effective, because I left a lot less bad aji around. In the space of a month or so, I learnt to think much less and play much better go (got up to abour 4 kyu). If you're coming from a chess background and are dogged by bad aji, you may well have the same problem. The solution could be as simple as not trying so hard - don't play stapes you've not seen before, stick to the safe patterns - avoid BAD SHAPE.
These days, I still merit the term 'BadShape', but more at the start (I'm very poor - because I'm not intersted in spending time to learn josekis). A collection of my commented tournament games is available online from I wrote a Ph.D. thesis on game-tree searching inspired by ComputerGo, planning a program which had no pattern matcher! My thoughts on shape were best summarised by a comment from a 5 Dan amateur: "The Best shape is the shape that works." This maxim does not pay quite enough attention to aesthetics, I don't think, but has an appealingly simple logic. Tamsin: There was a famous British chess columnist who adopted the soubriquet "BadMaster?" after he lost a tournament game in only seven moves. Perhaps, you could be "Bad Meijin", "Unshape" or somesuch. On the other hand, your handle does not bother me as much as it does Dieter (who deleted his comments in the meantime), perhaps because you take the trouble of providing an adequate definition of the go term before you talk about yourself. Arno: I suggest creating a page Bad Shape (The Player)? and link that page from here. I think this is more reasonable. BadShape: Hey, Sorry Dieter! Perhaps I do belong on another page. I don't mean to Wikisquat. I've been Badshape for over a decade now, and I've kind of grown into the name, so a name change is unlikely - but maybe I should have a page of my own. Or maybe I should put more of my bad shape on this one, which is relevant to both meanings of the phrase:)?... Path: Mistake · Prev: AutomaticPlay · Next: BadStyle This is a copy of the living page "Bad shape" at Sensei's Library. ![]() |