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This page is a personal project by Dieter. It is an attempt to accurately describe Go theory.
Go Theory starts with rules. From the rules we can derive principles. For a deeper understanding of those principles, we develop several concepts. The principles and the related concepts have been caught into proverbs in the traditional treatment of the game's theory. The game has three aspects: technique, tactics and strategy, so proverbs will typically look at one of those three aspects.
The following choices in this article deserve some motivation:
The chunk of edits on basic strategy, made in September-October 2005, were largely inspired by Minue's Haengma tutorial for beginners. Before that, another major influence has been Benjamin Teuber's essay on Stone Counting Teaching Method.
Your comments on the discussion page are appreciated.
In this game end, Black has put down 11 stones on the board. White 10. To understand why empty points remain, one must know the rule of capture (see below).
Black passes at .
has four liberties.
has three liberties.
has two liberties.
has three liberties, as has the unmarked black stone.
The two black stones on the left form a chain with 6 liberties. The white stones are also a chain with 6 liberties (because the marked stone takes a liberty from the original 7).
The two black stones do not form a chain. You could say there are two chains of one stone each. The white stones form two chains of two stones.
There is a rule of capture stating that
After , the marked black stone is captured. The state after
, where the marked stone has only one liberty left, is called atari.
A note on suicide: after applying the rule of capture, if the played stone belongs to a chain with no liberties, this
chain is taken off the board. Alternatively, such a play is forbidden.
The move is useless, because the stone remains without liberties, and is made illegal in the rules that most people apply. The same goes for
.
However, after , the three white stones have no liberty and are removed, after which
has liberties. Idem for
: the marked stones are removed and
has liberties.
In some situations, board positions can be infinitely repeated. The ko rule forbids this. However, the game principles dealing with ko are advanced and do not affect the basic ideas of Go.