Online Tournament Game With Bent Four

Recently I joined a new room on KGS called Invincible.  They are hosting an eight week tournament, and I decided to participate.  So far I have played three games in the tournament.

Today's game was a win for me by resignation.  (It is the only game played by me (buzzsaw) on January 17, 2014.  So take a look if you like.  I played black with a two stone handicap against a 6k opponent.  The rule set we are using for the tournament is the AGA ruleset, which I am pretty familiar with since I have played in AGA tournaments face to face since 1997.

My opponent was a fairly aggressive player and I was feeling behind, but I got lucky in that he failed to make a protective move in the upper right corner.  This allowed me to play two forcing moves that threatened snapback allowing me to create bent four in the corner, which I initially thought was a sure kill.

When my opponent made his first pass I asked him if he recognized the upper right as bent four and, therefore, dead.  He told me that he thought it was seki.  I knew it was bent four, but I also knew that by AGA rules we really were supposed to play it out.  I also knew that I should eliminate all ko threats before initiating the ko.  We discussed it and I decided not to accept it as seki, but play it out instead.

What happened was I stared at the board for a few minutes and grew impatient and scatterbrained.  I thought I was going to have to lose points to eliminate the threats, but what I failed to remember is that my opponent was going to spend a point for every pass he made.  Actually he could eliminate ko threats too with his turn, but that didn't really matter because regardless of who had more ko threats the other side could continue to eliminate theirs and force the opponent to give a stone in return.   My rational, calm, post game mind tells me these things, which my irrational, perturbed, "game" mind could not recall.

I finally threw caution to the wind and initiated the ko.  He made me respond to a first ko threat, but when the second threat that was played against me I realized that it was not really a threat at all because it depended upon the stones I could capture for its effectiveness, so I ignored the threat, and captured the stones.

My opponent resigned.  We had a nice review afterwards with some observers chiming in a bit.

What excitement.

What fun.