Go last night

Last night's Go started with a discussion of the one space pincer of the two-space low approach to the star point, with Serdyn. There's one move in the standard sequence that still puzzles me, but I know a bit more about the sequence now, at least.

Then I played Rory, in a comedy of errors. Rory tried to defend a group I was threatening to capture, but still allowed me a snapback in a terrible blunder, but in return I missed a ladderbreaker. After that we kep exchanging chunks by blunder, and then I underestimated a large-scale attack, lost a large group by playing too heavily, and ended up down by 16.5 points in a game where I gave him 2 stones. I had it sewn up, but only because of his snapback blunder, I expect, so the result was probably reasonable.

Then I played 3 "how far can you win on scratch" games. PW went down by almost 300 after a dead group of his came alive when I misread and he punished me. Louis made a critical error in his only live group to allow me to get a seki there as well, so he had no points on the board at the end of the game. This game also featured a seki-"bent four in the corner" combination, so I only managed to keep my seki thanks to the Japanese rules. (Final score was probably a win by about 340).

The last 2 games had featured ridiculous cuts, and when I tried that in my next game against Adrian, I was seriously punished, pulling out only a 36 point win on scratch against him. The weird thing is that Adrian and Louis are 14k and 15k respectively.

Anyway, this weekend is the WC Closed Meijin Challenger's League. 2 wins there may get me a promotion, and will secure my spot in the league for next year. We'll have to see...