The Direction of Play

There’s nothing more satisfying than returning to a book that one put down once-upon-a-time because it was too impossibly difficult and finding that it has magically become readable. This was my experience with Takeo Kajiwara’s The Direction of Play.

I remember looking at the book when I was somewhere between 19-15 kyu. I enjoyed Chapter 1, but gave up soon after that because I didn’t feel I understood what was going on.

This time, I felt I was able to at least follow the commentary and appreciate what was going on. I think I am a long way away from being able to apply the ideas in the book to my own games (I only got two of the seven problems correct in Chapter 7), but I still feel it was worth reading at this stage. If nothing else, it gave me a little insight into whole-board thinking, and presented a framework with which one can think about one’s games (i.e. the idea of considering the direction in which stones exert their power). I’m just beginning to think about reviewing professional games, so I really appreciated reading the in-depth analysis of the games that were included.

It’s difficult for me to formulate a take-home message for this book – I read it hoping to get a general feel for direction of play rather than for specific techniques or strategies. I liked the imagery in the book, and I think it may prove useful to think about stones as radiating power, and reaching out toward different parts of the board. Hmm. When I come to put these sorts of things in words, it all sounds a bit nebulous. I suppose that’s because of the nature of the book. It’s definitely one of those reads where the sense of a general concept begins to glimmer through a lot of specific examples which need to be taken as a whole.

Perhaps a reread when I’m stronger is in order. There was a lot of talk about when to depart from joseki and when various joseki are good or bad. I didn’t get the sense that I had to know lots of joseki to follow the text, but I suspect I’ll get more out of some of the examples once I can consider the positions with a repertoire of joseki at my fingertips.

Position of the Week – 2

Well, this is hardly a weekly series, but never mind!

When I was first learning about Go, I was so baffled by the placement of stones in the opening and the sorts of comments of strong players had about fuseki that I drew a cartoon for R4D in which a bewildered me lost a game at Move 1 because she didn’t understand the ramifications of playing the 3,3 point. Of course, then I learned a few things about corners and everything sorted itself out for awhile.

Recently, however, I read Takeo Kajiwara’s The Direction of Play. Chapter Three is intriguingly entitled, “Move Two Lost The Game” and begins with this anecdote:

“A certain professional go player, carefully scrutinising one of his own games, once remarked with a sigh: ‘Ah, move two lost me the game.’”

Kajiwara then goes on to show an amateur game in which he claims that Move Two was probably a losing move.

So, the question is this: which play is the losing move, A, B or C?

Kajiwara’s answer is here….