Cho Chikun defended the Judan title 3-2!
He won the last game by 3.5 points.
Interestingly, this last game was played on a Western-style table, instead of the traditional tatami mat - see pictures here and here.
I am very glad Cho Sensei won - he is one of the last representatives of the old Kitani School that is still competing successfully with the newer generation of players in Japan.
The title holder, Cho Chikun, continued the pressure on the challenger Yamashita Keigo (the Kisei title holder) in the Judan title and won the second game after another spectacular fight.
I wrote a few thoughts on this second game.
Here is the position after move 76, and a nice whole board problem: Black to play next and do something about White’s moyo on the right side.
Update: see this very nice article on the second game, by Pieter Mioch.
Yamashita won the 3rd Kisei game by resignation, just like he did in the first two.
Looks like Kobayashi Satoru is not in good shape. I don’t know the professional verdict on this third game, but it seemed to me that after the first day, with black so strong in the center and white struggling for life on the lower side, white had a difficult game already. Please let me know if any of you followed the pro comments!
One interesting position in the second day of the game was the following, after move 83: it is white’s turn.
The position is complicated, so it is very instructive to pretend you are white and decide where to play next - this is actually the basis of studying pro games, just pretend it’s yourself playing, think what you’d play, then compare with what happened in the game.
Another interesting question, about the same position: analyse the status of the white group in the lower right: it has 2 eyes, right? Well, there is a small catch: there is something that black can try, only it doesn’t quite work yet. What’s the furthest black stone that, would that be present on the board, the attack would succeed?
This is a good question to ask, because in the heat of the game we often forget that the status of a group can change when the surroundings change.
My name is Sorin Gherman. I studied Go as an insei in Japan, and I built 361points.com to share my Go experience with you.
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