[pbmserv] WARI lesson!

[Bill Taylor <W.Taylor@math.canterbury.ac.nz>]

The Marathon tournament, Wari section, is rolling along towards the end
of round one, and I thought I'd post a position here that cropped up
in one of my tournament games.  It is quite startling.

The startling nature of it is that I get into such a poor position,
through the strategic awareness of my opponent, that I may as well
have resigned the game there and then, even though NOT A SINGLE STONE
HAD YET BEEN CAPTURED!  I daresay this sort of thing has happened before,
but I don't recall of any.      Here is the position...


   f    e    d    c    b    a 
+----+----+----+----+----+----+   North : opponent   0
|  0 |  1 |  1 |  0 |  0 |  5 |
+----+----+----+----+----+----+
|  0 | 15 | 10 |  0 |  9 |  7 |
+----+----+----+----+----+----+   South : kiwibill   0
   a    b    c    d    e    f 

Not only has nothing been captured, but a brief glance at the board
suggests I should be ahead, having control of all the big piles.

However, a deeper look at my options show that I am in a very parlous
state indeed!  In fact, there is really nothing I can do to get out of
the hole I'm in, and I doubt that I can legitimately win any captures
before my opponent has made a huge number.  I may as well resign, in fact.

I think it may well be worth looking at this, and see if you can
mentally play it out for a few variations at small depth, just to
convince yourself that it is so.  I believe it is an instructive
position.  I was totally outplayed to get into this mess.

Anyway, I resisted the despairing temptation to resign immediately,
and played on in the forlorn hope that my opponent wasn't as good
as he appeared to be so far.  As it happened, it wasn't till he had
amassed 18 points that I even had a chance to get a capture!!
He played almost perfectly to keep me shut out.  I still resisted
the temptation to go for easy takes, and desparately built up
control again till it even got to 24-0, when I finally scrambled
a draw by blitzing.  So I guess there's another lesson there -
never resign a game till you can count out a loss!

But the point of this post is not to brag yet again, but to display
the remarkable position above, with no captures as yet, yet where a player
(me) can appear to be superficially in control, but in fact confidently
look forward to being 18-0 or so down in a little while.

-- kiwibill