My First Crane's Nest

We have all seen the Crane's Nest in our studies of life and death. And since everyone else has seen it as well, our opponents may see it coming, and it is rare for it to come up in actual play. I played a Wings Go Club League Game last night which gave me my first opportunity to play the Crane's nest. I hope to eventually learn how to post a game record here, but for now I will just put up a couple of screen captures of this interesting game. Anyone who wants to see the setup of the position can look at my info as buzzsaw on KGS and bring up the buzzsaw-Kireta game of 2007-10-16. I was white.

Here is the Crane's Nest:

This capture was satisfying, but didn't give me nearly enough of an advatage to win the game. It happened fairly early in the game, and my opponent clearly outplayed me throughout the opening. and was leading by about nine points when I made a fatal cut that resulted in the capture of nine stones. My opponent went on to atari the cutting stone so as to make life along the bottom. The 18 point swing was enough for me to win the game with a final score of +12.5 for white.

Earlier in the game I had attempted a throw in at t7 which made the cut of r4 a failure because the black stones along the right still had two liberties and black could atari from s4 since there was no shortage of liberties for black on the left. Naturally I tenukied at that time. It was only after the final liberty of the black stones along the bottom was taken that the cut worked since either atari would result in a loss for black, albeit the atari from r3 made the most sense.