UK Tie with Germany

The fourth round of the B-League on 12th December saw the UK playing one of the other teams on three wins, Germany. After some exciting games the match ended a draw. This left UK just above Germany on boards won, but Netherlands were expected to beat Turkey and take the number one spot in the league table.

Daniel Hu wrote: I won against Jonas Welticke 6d by resignation, bring me to an unbelievable 10/10 on pandanet! This was supposed to be my toughest test so far, so while maths has been prioritised this term, I tried to study go for the last 2 weeks, particularly define 3.0 on the computer Go server.

He opened adventurously with four 11-3s. Especially as I wanted to play territorially anyway, this set bells ringing in my head that this should be a territorial game (hard to make frameworks, so I focused on the corners). He invaded 3-3 into my star point and his result was poor when I took the corner (the 10-3 was an inefficient one space extension from a ponnuki). He attached star point on my komoku, I took the corner and I was happy. He attached 3-3 on my other komoku, and I was very happy to take a very large corner.

He finally invaded 3-3 into my other star point, I played good direction, but overlooked a severe cut, when he blatantly had more ko threats. However, instead of ending the ko to get a good result, he made the ko even bigger. He played a poor ko threat worth around 25 points. Ending the ko, I got a massive corner territory plus thick influence, and he had a wasted stone on the outside.

Furthermore, he overlooked a lovely tesuji I had for liberties in the semeai, and a horrific bulky 6 tesuji, so even his follow up to his ko threat died on a large scale. So by move 90, I already had 80 solid territory points compared to his 20 or so. He had to place his hopes on the centre.

I decided I still wanted an interesting game, and played daringly into the centre, but a peep overplay and a big blunder on the upper left, meant my group in the centre wasn’t clearly alive. However, his position was just too thin and eventually I captured another 50 point group with my centre group.

Unfortunately I then realised I had 2 seconds to play 2 moves. So I was frantically power-clicking S19, a move worth around 200 points just in case he ataried it. I wouldn’t mind if he got three moves elsewhere, as long I could play S19 (and maybe S18 to fill my own territory) and get into the next time period. He tortured me for 7 minutes like this! But he honourably resigned. I could have cried in relief.

Bruno Poltronieri wrote: I lost to Benjamin Teuber by resignation. I think the game started pretty well with both of us playing AlphaGo san-san invasions. In the middle game we both had unsettled running groups and I think it was fairly even. At some point though white’s group got out into the centre while consolidating white’s centre potential into points.

At this point I was badly behind so I tried cutting off one of white’s groups towards the top side. Benjamin played a forcing move that wasn’t really forcing which allowed me to completely cut off his group. It was a semeai where I had an eye and he didn’t so I really thought I would win it (and it seems so did everyone watching), but my group got squeezed a lot and it turned into a massive seki. I was far behind on points on so I resigned.

Looking at the capturing race now it’s not clear what I should have done so maybe it wasn’t as simple as I thought. I’ll take a proper look tomorrow.

Alex Kent wrote: I lost my game against Martin Ruzicka by a large margin (though it was inflated a bit by the incorrect komi!).

The opening seemed to be in reasonable balance, though my opponent's position became very thick. I went wrong in the middle game by allowing a group to become too weak, and ended up making an unfavourable trade for it. I found a nice tesuji later on which prompted a large trade, but this again created a weak group that was hard to manage. Later on I tried to capitalise on some bad aji, but this did not pan out and I was left with no way to catch up.

Chris Bryant wrote: I won my game against Michael Palant by resignation. I played quite a fast opening, ended up with a good presence in all four corners in exchange for tenukiing a couple of his moves, and in return he got quite a large moyo, but it was a bit undercut on one of the edges. He invaded quite deeply into my area and ended up making two weak groups next to each other. He played a move on one of them that felt a bit slack, so I attacked the other, figuring I'd get enough strength to try to kill the one he played the slack move on.

He ended up actually letting me totally surround the group I attacked though, instead of defending himself. He chose two outside moves (the first of which I think is a super nice tesuji, the second of which I think is really greedy) instead of connecting himself out. So I cut him off, and then he scrambled around realising that he didn't have enough space to live in. He got a semeai against my cutting group but realistically I had a lot of space to run into, and ended up winning when he let me capture another few of his stones in the centre.

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