The recovery

It has been 2 days since I start re-studying Go, and the results were rather drastic. After looking through the games that I lost so badly, I manage to correct my opening and hence that made me won 6 games in a row. Tolerance, and patience. That's the key. How do you apply tolerance in go? Well, just look at the diagram below.


The situation above is so common in amateur games. Just look at the board carefully. We're playing on the upper left of the board. Normally, a lower kyu (14kyu above) would respond in a manner similar to the diagram below.


When black ataris at 1, white will escape by doing to 2. Now black is in gote, because he needs to cover the cutting point at 3. Hence, white will use the sente to make a pincer move at 4, thus limiting the 3 black stones ability to expand. And, to make the situation even worse, the upper single black stone, is as good as dead (assuming there are no reinforcements on the right). A better move rather than going for an atari at 1 (above), is extending to 1 (below).

White will have to respond, by extending his move to 2, in order to keep his connection alive, and thus killing the single black stone. But with this move, black gets the opportunity to extend to 3, which is valued around 10 points. As you would be able to see, the extension at 3 is way better and much more profitable than an atari at 1 (middle diagram).