Ladder
A ladder is a technique for capturing stones. At each step the attacker reduces the defender's liberties from two to one.
The term ladder is also debatable. The term "stair" is much better to describe this form. (But... A stair and not a ladder, a thing and not a process? It's a reckless path to disaster, not a trip to the attic.)
Example
If White tries to escape, Black can at each time play atari and White will be captured.
Clearly White should see this and not play .
Long ladder
Ladders may span a large part of the board. If for example Black captures the white stone in a ladder with , the ladder will go all over the board if White tries to escape, resulting in the next diagram.
If White tries to escape, the ladder will continue in this way. Of course, as it stands, this is a disaster for White.
But if there had 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 ladder from working is called a ladder-breaker.
Linguistic note on Chinese
The Chinese term for "ladder", 征子 (zhēng zǐ), came from the term 长征 (cháng zhēng), which means "long march".
See also:
- Ladder-breaker
- broken ladder
- Ladder/reading techniques
- Loose ladder (yurumi shicho)
- Shunt
- Net
- Non Local Move Versus A Local Move
- If you don't know ladders, don't play go
- Capture stones caught in a ladder at the earliest opportunity
- Ladder strategy / Discussion
- Double ladder
- Parallel ladders
- Double threat ladder-maker
- Longest Ladder Problem
- Practicing Reading Out Ladders
- Valentine's day problem
- Ladder exercises
- Driving tesuji
- Ladder oddity
- ladder ko