Basic Tactics

[Introduction] [How to Play] [Ending Games] [Etiquette] [Tactics] [Strategy] [Life and Death] [Ranks/Grades]

Learn by Playing

Again, I cannot recommend highly enough the free, stripped down version of Many Faces of Go, Igowin. This only plays 9x9, but it is an excellent training partner to get a beginner competent at tactical play on a small board. You really want to be consistently beating it with a 3 stone handicap before trying your hand against players on a server such as this one.

Basic Go Tactics

It is an oversimplification to break down Go into two distinct sections (tactics and strategy), but for the purposes of demonstrating principles it is very useful to do so.

Tactics refers to the "close", or "local" plays that occur on the board. By this we refer to responses to attacks or challenges on individual stones or areas. As with all games, these tend to be rules of thumb, and act merely as guidelines of play, very useful to a beginner learning the ropes but broken as and when required by players good enough to understand the reasoning behind the rules.

I cannot recommend Sensei's library enough for this section, so I will simply index a number of their most useful pages for beginners in approximately the order that, as a recent beginner, I find the most useful in developing early "close play" abilities.

Basic Instinct

The first and most useful thing to learn is how to respond to individual stones played near yours, and learn the exceptions to the instinct rules by seeing them played out. Learning all of the following in order will mean you can quickly prevent the early deaths of your stones through simple tactical technique: [Sensei's Basic Instinct Section].

Simple Tacticals Patterns

As soon as you are happy with dealing with basic challenge responses, it is well worth learning to spot and to create ladders and nets, and to avoid fundamentally weak shapes such as empty triangles.

From this point it is worth working on some common, but slightly more complicated tesujis (clever plays) such as the Crane's nest tesuji.

Snapback

The final tactic that it is vital for a beginner to add to their tactical library is the snapback. The ko rule prevents a player from immediately returning a capture on an intersection where they just had one of their stones captured. However, this only applies to single stone captures. If the return capture actually captures a group of stones, then it is a valid move, and is known as a snapback. An example where a snapback can occur is as follows:

Snapback before invasion	White invades Black cuts his losses
Instead of capturing White allows Black to capture	White responds by capturing 3 black stones

Move on to [Basic Strategy]

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