Go advice by Furuyama Kazunari - Tournaments

 The text below was written by Furuyama Kazunari on facebook
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☆　Go advice　☆
A friend of mine ( and a student of mine) is participating in a tounrnament soon. So I thought I should give this advice, the time and the opening.

The time:
When you play a tournament, you have only limisted amount of time. You shouldn't spend time on the opening. You should use your time in the middle game, especailly fight and life-and-death.
And in the endgame if you don't have time, you often end up misrably. Even if you are 20 points or 30 points ahead, your opponent could turn around the situation if you don't have time to think. I have experienced this so many times when I was an insei. So use your time wisely.

The opening:
In order not to spend time in the opening, I think the following advice helps.
When you're Black, you should certainly play your favorite opening.
The problem is White. When you are White, you should try to prevent your opponent from playing her / his favorite opening such as the Chinese fuseki.

The Chinese fuseki is really hard to tackle unless you have studied it extensively. When I was 13, I was White and didn't know how to invade the Chinese fuseki and lost the game misrabely. Even if you have studied the Chinese fuseki, new patterns come out often, and it's very hard to keep up with everything.

Later on when I played a tournament in Tokyo, and when my opponent played the first move at Q16 and the third move at Q3, I played my fourth move at Q5 immediately (for kyu players, I recommend Q5 and not R5 because R5 has far more variations). After this, he and I had to face a new fuseki. So whoever strong was likely to win (and I won). If I had let him play the Chinese fuseki, he would have played the fuseki just like top pros play. So all his moves were as wonderful as top pros up to a certain moves. But when I played the fourth move at Q5, he had to play his own moves rather than top pros' moves. So it's much easier for me to fight.

In addition, if you let your oppoents play their favorite fuseki, it's very likely that they don't spend time because they know what to do, but you probably have to spend time on finding out how to tackle an unfamiliar fuseki. So you may lose your time very fast in the opening.

To prevent your oppoents from play their favorite fuseki may also be helpful psychologically. If you prevent that, they can be discouraged.

I hope this helps. Good luck with your tournament.

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I though this was a very nice article by Kaz so I reposted this. Visit Kaz's page and say hello to him. He is very nice and fun as a Baduk teacher.

Kaz's Facebook page

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