Need to study bases and openings

Initially the opening was scary, because just like an artist can freeze up at a blank canvas or a writer at a blank page, starting a Go game was something that seemed all too easy to mess up with a bad first move. But it is a mental block you have to get past to play, so I grasped on to the 3-4 opening. It has an expected follow on at 5-3 and gives you a nice enclosure. Any decent opening was enough at first - I just needed to get into the game far enough to start seeing those tsumego like patterns starting to form - now we are playing!

But, I got tired of the 3-4 as all too often I didn't get the chance to follow up with the 5-3. Even if I did, the likelihood of extending to the appropriate side star point (the one on the 3-4's side) was even slimmer. About then the brilliance of the 4-4 started making sense. It is less of an enclosure of the corner, and more like getting home field advantage when the fight for the corner begins.

Next thing that hits me is that the corners and sides are much more valuable than I could possibly have imagined! I had been playing some kind of "send eyeless dragons down from the center to reduce opponent's side territory, and then tie them together with a big central moyo" strategy (my poor man's attempt at a cosmic Takemiya Masaki style), but it didn't seem to work. I never ended up with that much territory in the center, due to opponents reductions and the difficulty of surrounding territory that requires stones on all four sides. My appreciation of the Go Proverbs "Corner, Side, Center" and "There is no territory in the center" grew immensely.

Imagining that the territory in the center was worthless, and that lines 1 through 4 were all that mattered helped me start focusing on fighting more fiercely for every point on the corners and sides. I tried to make all my moves on the 3rd and 4th lines unless defense required a move somewhere else. I think this is the right way to look at the board - at least for now. (As the game proceeds, any center area being surrounded by an opponent can be fairly easily reduced.)

My latest difficulty is building successful bases. I can claim a few corners with my opening stones, but then I need to invade and break up my opponent's areas. I know about what the size of a base is supposed to be, but I am pretty fuzzy on the details after that. I can't tell if a base is alive or not. So, I need to work on understanding bases.

And since this is one of the first things you do after the opening, it makes sense that the opening sets you up for the "base building phase". So, after finding a way to get past the "beginner's paralysis" in the opening, I am now ready to start studying why different openings make sense, and which may fit best with how I like to play.