Concept notes

Deep Valleys 谷が深い

This is not really a concept, and even if it is, it is apparently two separate ones: an old and a new. It seems more about life and death of a failed concept. The seed was planted, it flowered briefly, it was trampled on, it is now forgotten, replaced by a weed that even took its name.

It was introduced at a time when players and go writers were trying to make the game more accessible to the public through commentaries, and it is still in common (if now different) use, which makes it worth knowing.

It seems as if the term was coined by Kitani Minoru. He had a reputation for coining new terms and the one here seems to have been picked up as a favourite of his close friend Go Seigen, so there is no reason to doubt that.

What it is legitimate to doubt is what the term means. The surface meaning is easy: "the valley is deep". In modern use it appears that this plain meaning is retained and the term is attached to moyos (frameworks) that take on a (good) deep valley-like shape. Japan being so mountainous, a valley is rarely shallow, and so the image conveyed would usually be more like a ravine or a gorge. Better yet might be a dingle or a glen. The benefit of dingle is that you can then call an invading stone a dingleberry! However, it seems to be used of even flat valleys. Whatever the precise geology, though, this modern usage is barely more than a description. It doesn't aid very much in making a strategic decision.

Kitani (we shall assume it was he) apparently had a very different, if vague, notion which certainly plays a part in talking about strategy, and this is how Go Seigen used it. Because it is vague, you will need to look at the examples, and even then you may feel you are chasing shadows.

Hayashi Yutaka, the chief editor of Kido, was one who tried to pin it down and he began, "A rather difficult term used by pros." His attempt at a definition has been copied since, almost word for word, by every official terms dictionary we have seen (they haven't got round to mentioning the modern usage mentioned above). The agreed definition is: "Deep. Rather than attack full on, you play first on the other side. By looking for complications you add breadth to the scope of your tactics and deepen the implications."

Until you see an example (Example 1 is the one quoted by Hayashi) you might think this means no more than trying a leaning attack or adding aji (but "complications" is actually aya which is a more fluid notion than aji). Even after looking at an example you might think it adds nothing to the sum of go knowledge and is not even a very good description. A phrase like "you need to add more mustard to the hot dog" could probably do just as well.

This vagueness is more than likely why the old Kitani meaning has been usurped, more or less, by the modern moyo land-grab meaning. Terms do die and don't always merit a requiem mass. This one is one possibly also one that needs no lamenting, but its fairly frequent use by the top players and commentators of a recent and important period in go history makes it at least worth recording.

Useful proverbs

• None, it seems.

© John Fairbairn & T Mark Hall (GoGoD), London 2011.