Dia. 1: The Orthodox Fuseki

I didn’t make time this week to put together a set of problems (I’ll try to get ahead of the game this weekend), so I’ve posted an article about one of my favorite openings — the orthodox fuseki.

Orthodox has been a popular opening throughout the modern era, but has surged in popularity among professionals since about 2001, now appearing in in about one in four professional games. It has also seen a number of recent innovations. Orthodox is a solid, steady opening, balancing influence and territory. It’s also relatively easy to understand — a good choice for novice players who are want to start studying specific openings.

Take a look at the extended entry for a more detailed examination.

Read the rest of this entry »

Now that the club blog is getting an established page rank it’s starting to get a lot of comment and traceback spam. I’ve turned on comment moderation until I get a good spam filter working, so it might take a little while until your comments appear. Fortunately, we have very few readers and even fewer leaving comments, so it shouldn’t be too much of a burden.

Once you’ve had one comment approved, further comments should get approved automatically. I’ll also get user registration set up at some point in the future, and will get the members area going. I’ve got lots of stuff planned, like a database search, club game archive, club ratings, correspondence games, even limited KGS integration are all possible.

I’ve also turned off the contact form because it was just sending me HUGE amounts of spam. I’ll turn it back on when I have time to set up one that does a better job blocking spammers. If you’d like to contact the club, please just leave a a comment on any post – we’ll get it. Or just show up at the club! Somebody is there every week (it will be posted here if a meeting is canceled).

Sorry for the delay on this week’s problems, I’ve been sick.

The novice and elementary problems this week share a common theme; in fact, the novice problem comes from an actual game of mine from years ago and shows a real-life example of how these tesuji are applied. The intermediate problem is another from the Gokyo Shumyo.

Remember, there are new problems here every Thursday.

You may recognize the novice problem this week, though this time roles are reversed. The intermediate problem is from section 2 of the Gokyo Shumyo.

Be sure to check back next week for more.

Here are this week’s problems. The intermediate problem is yet another from the Gokyo Shumyo and the novice problem comes from the godiscussions.com forum. I composed the elementary problem to illustrate a basic life and death concept.

Be sure to check back next week for more.