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Concept notes Ijime 虐め Harassment, bullying, torment, torture, persecution. These are clearly not things you want to suffer yourself, but in go it's often necessary to be a little sadistic to win the game. Harassment is perhaps best reserved as a strategic, large scale idea - chasing weak enemy groups and picking up gains on the way. Great if you can do it, but that is not what we mean here. Ijime, which we will call bullying, is more a tactical concept rather than a strategic one. It refers to moves against an enemy group that has to answer submissively, often just to make minimum life, and which ends up wholly enclosed. Every move by the persecutor is adding value to his own position, either as territory or strength, and nothing is added for the victim. His group is shut out of the rest of the game and all he gets is to secure the few points he already had. Allowing that to happen seems like a recipe for disaster, yet it happens surprisingly often in professional games. Part of the reason is that it can be allowed if there is sufficient compensation elsewhere. The persecuting side also has to find a way to make use of his local advantage, and for that reason the ijime episode often comes to dominate the strategy in the rest of the plot. But bullying happens very, very often in amateur games, and may even be the main cause of lost points. This applies to even games as well as handicap games. There is often a major difference between bullying in pro games and bullying in amateur games, however: amateurs often submit to bullying tactics when they don't have to. You will probably be aware of the example from Kageyama Toshiro's classic Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go, shown below. In this 5-stone game, Black was easily ahead before White 1, but in the space of 38 moves White takes the lead by 10 points - all because Black allowed himself to be bullied.
The correct procedure for Black was to adopt the strategy of mutual damage, as in the next diagram.
Black has to answer at 2, as this group does not have room to play on the other side. Although it is not a serious case, this group can be considered to have been allowed to be fall into a situation where it can be bullied. But when White plays 3, Black makes sure he does not fall behind by making the same sort of move against White, at 4. In this case Black's group in the upper right has room to defend itself, and although the territory there may dwindle, White's territory at the top is suffering meltdown. Simple forcing moves are not bullying. The idea of total enclosure is usually present. In a pro game, such an instance is more likely to define strategy than represent a loss, but if you suffer bullying two or more times in a game you are likely to lose even without any fancy strategy on your opponent's part. As to how you get into the undesirable situations where you are being bullied, apart from giving in when you don't have to as in the case above, it is usually the result of wrongly choosing to fight inside the opponent's sphere of influence. Overplays and invasions should only be used when you are irretrievably behind, but even in marginal cases they have the drawback that they are likely to end in gote and cause collateral damage. Simple erasure, which end in sente, or honte (safe-and-sound moves), which are gote no sente rather than gote (gote now but so unassailable and strong that they effectively turn into sente later), are better techniques to have in your standard repertoire. Useful proverbs
© John Fairbairn & T Mark Hall (GoGoD), London 2007. |
