Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Bad shapes - ripped moves and Elephant's eyes

This post is almost directly "ripped" from a page on Sensei's Library. So, you can see the source here: (FourBasicShapes). I will talk about 3 shapes - Knight's Move, One Point Jump and Elephant's Move. The first 2 are good moves that can be exploited, the 3rd is not so good as we will see.
On the left side of the diagram below you see a knights move (or keima in Japanese) and a one point jump created by black. These are good, normal moves. But they can be "ripped" apart. One proverb says, "Attack the knight's move at the waist.". On the right you can see the same shapes build by white, but ripped apart by black. These show good shapes for black and bad shape for white.


Another possible move is the Elephant's Jump. It is named after the move in shogi made by the elephant. It is the One point diagonal jump seen below at the left. It has a weak spot called the "Elephant's Eye", which is right in the middle of the 2 stones (see the 3 stone group second from left). The 2 groups on the right show possible continuations. White can either play directly against the black stone or diagonally (doing a 'shoulder hit' on the black stone at the Elephant's Eye). In each case black has a continuation that makes one of the shapes above. The Elephant Jump leads to a ripped shape!

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