Page:Smith - The game of go.djvu/228

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THE GAME OF GO

able to judge with far greater skill what to do when a position is threatened in actual play. He will be able to distinguish whether the danger is real, and whether it is, therefore, necessary to reply to his adversary's attack, or whether he can afford to ignore it and assume the "Sente" in some other part of the board. He will also be able to perceive when an adversary's group is vulnerable so that it will be profitable to attack it.

The collection of problems which I have given in this book are rearranged from Korschelt's work, and they were in turn taken by him from a Japanese treatise called "Go Kiyo Shiyu Miyo." Necessarily the collection here given is a very small one, but if any reader of this book becomes so much interested in the game that he desires to study other examples, he will doubtless find some Japanese acquaintance who can supply him with further material, as the Japanese literature of the game contains large collections.

The most important kind of problems are those in which the question is how to kill an adversary's group, or how to save one's own group when threatened. It is also often very important to know how a connection between two groups can be forced.

For greater clearness these problems are arranged under seven heads; to wit,

1. Saving Threatened Groups.

2. Killing Groups.

3. Playing for "Ko."

The advantage gained by this operation is not apparent in the group itself, but depends upon which player has the larger threatened group elsewhere.

4. Reciprocal Attacks or "Semeai."