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The consul invited Mrs Kobayashi, a profession Go player, to visit Edinburgh for three days, to teach and demonstrate, and he involved the local Go club to ensure an enthusiastic audience and obtain extra hands to man the stand and explain Go to the general public.
I'm involved with Edinburgh Go Club. Together with Phil Blamire we manned the Go boards on Friday. We played three games during the morning. Phil has an impetuous fighting style and lost our first two games by losing big groups. We didn't attract an audience. Even a wild and dangerous fight appears to the unlearned observer as two middle-aged man taking it in turns to place black and white pebbles on a plank. We need knives and blood!
In the afternoon Mrs Kobayashi arrived and was kind enough to give short lessons to Phil and me. We were also too concerned with central influence. We hadn't really understood why stones run out into the centre. It is very important to do so to avoid being closed in a corner and forced to live small, so sometimes we failed to move into the centre when we needed to, but usually we were going into the centre in the hope of making territory, which we should have been making in the corner or on the side. In my final game of the day I played the Consul, giving him two stones. I took Mrs Kobayahsi's lesson on board as best I could. I made the usual 3,6 point approach to Mr Takahashi's 4,4 stone. He pincered. I jumped into the corner at the 3,3 point, allowing Mr Takahasi to wall me in, but giving me 10 points of corner territory. We repeated the pattern in another corner and Mr Takahasi had a deep moyo. I invaded as deeply as I dared and won by 48 to 47. Highlight of the day was seeing how Mrs Kobayashi explained the rule to interested members of the general public. She had a set routine which worked very well. Although the rules are simple it is still easy to botch explaining them. Now I've seen how a profession does it I hope to avoid messing it up myself in future.
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