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White 8 is bad Before we look at this new book, we will give an example of Go's provocation from the seminar, and also add some comments on 21st century go. First, the aggro. |
White 8 was forthrightly labelled a very BAD move in Igo no Shinri (page 13). No why or wherefore. That was bad enough, but a database search revealed, in over 120 games, that just about every top pro had played White 8 in this position. Indeed, the very first to do so was... Go Seigen (in 1936). More alarmingly, White had a whopping 56% winning rate - that is unusually large.
So you can see why some people thought the old man was non compos mentis. But! What the database also suggested was that when Go made this comment to O Rissei, around 1996, virtually all pros suddenly stopped playing White 8. We then had only one example post 1996 and that was in a game with an amateur - Rin Kaiho played it against Fernando Aguilar. Somehow, magically, word had got round instantly to the pros of Japan, Korea and China, and they all believed the Emperor, even if some elite British amateurs did not.