Norman Richards

During the holidays, I'm a little more free to go to the local go club.  I've been able to go these last few weeks, and I've had several good games.  There hasn't been much of an opportunity to play stronger players.  Besides the 1 dan player last week, it's all been handicap games of varying degrees. 

One of my games last night was a 7h game against young Korean kid who claimed to be about 8k.  I'm guessing he's about 11 or 12 years old, but since he wasn't very talkative I didn't inquire too much.  Playing him was quite a different experience from playing an older player with the same handicap.  His strengths and weaknesses were exactly opposite of adults I've played in that same range.  

What impressed me most was his apparent sharp reading ability - far surpassing that of a typical kyu player.  He played a fairly conservative opening (far too conservative for a high handicap game) without a very co-ordinated game strategy beyond that, but his tactical attacks at my group showed really good insight into shape, severely punishing a weak group of mine in a way I didn't expect of someone of his rank.  That combined with some textbook playouts of a couple of non-trivial josekis, as well as their followups, suggests he's been studying a lot.  I don't expect that from any 8k, especially a kid.

His reading broke down later in the game with a couple of endgame mistakes, which allowed me to come back.  I thought I had a small margin to win after that, so I tried not to be too severe, but in the final count black was ahead by 2 points, making me wish I had been a little more careful in my endgame.  

It was a very interesting game.  I'm very curious to see if other young players who've achieved his level of strength show the same patterns of play.