cap

    Keywords: Go term

Chinese: 镇 (zhen4); 镇头 (zhen4 tou2)
Japanese: 帽子 or ボウシ (boshi)
Korean: 모자씌움/帽子씌움 or 모착/帽着 (mo ja ss'eui um or mo ja shi um or mo chak)

The cap is visualized in the following diagram. It can be seen as the counterpart of the one point jump.

[Diagram]

Cap


Alex Weldon: I believe it's a bit more specific than that, though. It's only boshi if you're playing with an one point jump relationship to your opponents stone, with your stone in the direction of the center. Right? Or is the term more general than I believed it to be?

John Fairbairn This is an interesting one because the Japanese never define it really. They exploit the fact that boushi is written as a Sino-Japanese word and define it with a pure Japanese word meaning the same thing. A bit like cap: see hat. Hat: see cap. But I can say that a two-space cap is also possible.

Why not say cap? After all it's not boshi like hoshi, it's boushi.

Charles Matthews A cap should block the opponent's natural line of advance towards the centre. In the various counter-pincer strategies the key moment may come when you do that. But here 'towards the centre' doesn't mean towards tengen, necessarily. It means the opponent in the running fight has to turn though ninety degrees, or else make a soft-hearted shape. This would be worth a further page on cap as attacking play?.


[Diagram]

Cap as a reduction move

Here the cap reduces the moyo formed by the black stones. If Black were allowed to play at 1, his moyo would be perfected.

[Diagram]

Cap as an attacking move

Here the cap blocks off White's natural escape to the center. The purpose can be twofold: make territory at the top while White is fleeing along dame points and/or create thickness towards the center.


Authors:
Dieter Verhofstadt



This is a copy of the living page "cap" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2007 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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