Here are the weekly Go problems for week 44.
Black plays first in all problems and all solutions are labeled ‘correct’. Have fun!
Easy Go problem
You don’t always need two precise eyes to live.
Intermediate Go problem
Black’s group is trapped, unless you can capture some white stones…
Hard Go problem
Exploit a weakness to reduce white’s eyespace as much as possible.
Still want more Go problems?
You can find Go books packed full of life and death problems, tesuji problems and other valuable Go knowledge at the Go Game Shop.
Discuss other possible moves
If you have any questions or want to discuss any of these problems, please leave a comment below at any time. You can use the coordinates on the problem images to discuss a move or sequence of moves.
You can also download the solutions as a PDF or SGF file by clicking the links below each problem.
About David Ormerod
I even had to think about intermediate problem a bit this time. Hard one is cute as well. Good work.
Thanks Flandre, I’m glad to hear you found these ones interesting
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Great and beautyfull problems. Tha hard one was easy to me because I’ve seen the pattern before.
Thanks a lot.
That’s good Damián, it’s all about shapes and patterns
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These hard problems always make mourn for those games I lost by missing a kill without realizing it.
I think all Go players get that feeling sometimes Dieter, at least I do too. It’s amazing how many more opportunities you see when you get into the habit of solving problems regularly. Not just to capture groups, but to devise better strategies as well.
Perhaps this is the wrong place, but let me just say that the new BadukTV stream is excellent! It works perfectly on my Debian machine without reliance on buggy plug-ins (as was the case before the fix) and is much more reliable. It works like a charm on a tablet, too!
That’s great Byung Soo
. You’re getting the stream from our servers now and this is how we wanted it to work from the start. I’m glad it’s working well for you, thanks for letting me know.
As a glancing through passerby – the comments/hints on problems are extremely visible and encourage not thinking about problems.
It is also more difficult to avoid seeing the color of the player intended to play, which encourages players to not look at the board as a position and see possibilities, but rather as a “game to win”.
This is a bad approach to problems in almost every common/likely situation that involves Go players who are not extremely casual and looking at problems for a main reason other than improvement.
I was trying to avoid both and probably could have successfully, but my wandering eye snagged “group is trapped” and “Black to play.” on the intermediate problem.
If the hints and player to play were hidden with openable/closable tags, and perhaps a brief explanation as to proper/differing approaches to Go problems (Proper approaches can vary greatly but generally involve the treatment of problems as status problems being a vastly good thing), the problems would be much more useful to Go players looking at them.
Easy Go problem:
I see black dead.
” Now black’s alive in seki. If white tries to play A or B, black can capture and make two eyes.
White play A or B
Black captures.
White plays in between A and B and black is dead.
Good question.
Look closely again at the end position. Even after white plays back in between A and B, after black captures four stones, there’s still enough room to separate that space into two separate eyes, so black lives.
It helps to set it up on a board and play through the sequence if you’re having trouble seeing it. After awhile you’ll learn which shapes can be killed by putting a stone inside (that’s called nakade in Japanese) and which ones can still live despite nakade plays.
I’ll write a lesson on this as soon as I have time.