ATTACKING AND DEFENDING WEAK GROUPS

When evaluating a position, besides determining the balance of territories, an important consideration is the identification of weak groups. Positions often arise in professional games where one side seems to have secured a sizable amount of iron-clad territory, while the other side has little or even no area of the board that he can count on as territory. However, if the side with all the territory has a weak group, the other side can rectify this territorial imbalance by attacking that group. The purpose of the attack is not to capture the weak group, but to harass it and, in the process, build influence that will negatively affect the opponent's groups elsewhere on the board. Even when the territorial balance is relatively even, one side can gain an advantage by attacking a weak group. On the other hand, failure to reinforce a weak group can result in the disruption of the territorial balance.
This book covers all the techniques of attacking and defending weak groups. Each of the nine chapters starts with a few examples of the technique under study, then continues with a few problems showing how that particular technique was used in a professional game. The tenth chapter presents additional problems whose solutions draw upon the techniques studied in the preceding nine chapters.

 

Richard Bozulich was born in Los Angeles in 1936. From the age of four until 17 he studied to become a concert pianist. He then studied Mathematical Logic at UCLA from 1953 to 1956 under Richard Montague. He transferred to UC Berkeley and graduated in mathematics in 1966. In 1967 he went to Japan to study go. In 1968 he founded Ishi Press Inc. in Japan and published more than 45 books on go. In 1982 he founded Kiseido Publishing Company and has published more than 60 book on go with that company. Together with John Power, he started publishing a go magazine, Go World, in 1977. 129 issues were published until he stopped publishing it in 2013. He is said to be the most prolific writer of English-language go books, having written or translated almost 50 books on the game.