Right, story time!!! This one is TRUE, I
promise, and it is one of my favourite things
that has ever happened to me across a
goban!!! We were deep into a club game, and a
ko fight had broken out in the lower right
corner — not a small one, either. Both
of our big groups down there were living or
dying on the result. His dragon, my dragon,
the whole game riding on who blinked first.
So naturally, I looked at the upper left. Not
at the ko — the upper left, where, as
far as either of us actually knew, nothing
was happening!!! I sat there. I did not play.
I frowned at that corner like it held the
secrets of the universe, for a good long
while, long enough that he started glancing
over to see what on EARTH I had found over
there.
Then I played it: one stone, up in that
corner, tightening a liberty. That is
genuinely all it did. He could have ignored
it completely — it threatened
NOTHING real, I
want to be very clear about that, this is not
a story about a hidden tesuji!!! And here is
the part I am actually proud of: the instant I
set the stone down, I looked away from it.
Not at him. Not smug about it.
Just… away, as though I did not want
him to notice what I had just done. As though
it were a little embarrassing, how strong it
was.
He studied that corner for a long, long time.
I watched him do it out of the corner of my
eye!!! And here is the thing — he could
not find anything wrong with it, because
there was nothing to find. But because of how
I had behaved before I played it, and how I
behaved after, he answered it anyway. He
spent a move responding to a stone that
needed no response. That was the whole trick,
right there, and it cost him the ko. I took
the initiative, and one move later, his
dragon was mine.
This is why the strongest players I have ever
watched sit at the board with absolutely no
expression at all, win or lose, good move or
terrible one!!! The board itself is perfect
information — every stone is sitting
right there for both of you to see. But what
your opponent BELIEVES about what you can
see, and what you think is worth hiding from
him, is not on the board at all. That part
lives entirely in his head, and you can put
things there on purpose if you are patient
enough. It is, when you get right down to it,
the exact same game as Werewolf — I did
not invent that idea, but I have never had it
proven to me quite so expensively as I
proved it to him that night!!!