Turkey Defeated

The second match in the new league season was against Turkey. The match produced some entertaining games of which the British team won three to take their first win of the season. This left the team in sixth place out of ten.

Bruno Poltronieri was the losing player, by resignation to Emre Polat (5d). He wrote: I lost by resignation. I was relatively happy with the opening, though Leela seems to prefer Black. I then managed to cut off part of my opponent's group and get a fairly large territory on the right side, at which point I’m definitely leading. I guess I was too confident after that because I played a very questionable tenuki which probably made the game even again, if not worse. I actually still thought I was winning at this point, but it seems I was wrong. I probably had one more chance to play a cut in the top right, but I missed it. Then things started falling apart until a ko in my territory killed me ...

Andrew Simons wrote: I was pleased to win against Denis Karadaban (5d), by a comfy 14.5 points in the end. In the first few moves he made a misclick on the second line instead of third, and although I offered an undo/replay he declined. Although it probably wasn't actually super-terrible, that gave me some confidence that if I played a solid and thick game I could win without getting into any risky situations where I could misread and mess up. We did a few AI josekis, and then he made an aggressive cut at the top right, which serendipitously a Chinese 5d had played against me a few weeks ago at the London club and a few days ago at the Wessex tournament, so I had studied how to handle it. When he invaded the right side he let me split his groups, so I took the base of his left side to try to get some splitting attack potential. He then started a big ko which I didn't want to answer submissively, we both made what were probably slightly lossy ko threats which made his group heavier so I defended a cut, letting him amplify the ko and planned to ignore his threat. He did find quite an annoying one, but I managed to sacrifice my group to get a wall and gobble his lower right on a large scale with good aji (I was tempted to get fancy and try a ladder breaker for 129 but decided crude but simple was enough). Maybe 139 was overly solid and it looked like he might turn his upper right group into eyes/points but I found a way to take them whilst keeping my lower right and was pretty confident. He launched a final attack with 164, I played a bad timesuji of 165 and then chickened out to make some eye space. The final excitement came at 178, but thankfully my timesuji of 177 got me a new overtime period and I read out that I could connect at 179 thanks to the threat to cut his big eyeless group, he captured two stones but my group remained safe and I got nice yose against his corner for the win.

Jon Diamond wrote: Well, I managed to win by 5.5 points, reasonably comfortably, against Cagdas Yeloglu (2d). After restarting the game playing with the correct colours, I think he over pressed and after some exchanges he created a ko to cut his way out, but in return left his centre stones under pressure. After he played 4-4 against my 3-3, I decided to ignore this and defend my centre stones, whilst attacking his central ones and trying to leave his 4-4 group as a heavy, small one. This worked out better than I could have expected, with my central stones being able to isolate two stones, albeit with some collateral damage. However, his central stones were now under heavy attack.

I decided that his collateral damage was too big and his upper right group would be in danger, so went back to make two eyes and connect my groups on the right and let him escape - but with expectation of making territory through this escape. However, I made a bad mistake with 143, but he failed to notice that playing next to it would capture my seven stones and remove all danger, so I breathed again, but 155 was another bad mistake letting him connect out and make his corner into territory. So now to attack the upper right, but I failed to spot that the throw-in created a ko I couldn’t win, so he lived easily....

The situation was still good as the left hand side would be favourable for me, but I should have captured the two stones at the top with 199. Then 219 was damezumari, but the loss wasn’t very high, so I was still leading and so it proved at the end.

Jamie Taylor wrote: I was very surprised to win by 1.5 points against Kaan Malçok (2d). I got a good lead in the middle game by killing black's corner and very narrowly avoided losing some stones of my own, but then my opponent, who had been playing some extremely tricky moves all through the game managed to catch me out, with something I really should have seen. He tore off a big chunk of territory and I was certain I was about 20 points behind, then I think I lost some more points trying to be too ambitious in the endgame. And then I won somehow.

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