Mutually Assured Destruction
Yoonseul Baduk Academy.
"…"
It hadn't been rational. It hadn't been level-headed. I had provoked and insulted her teacher as if I were someone worth listening to — as if I had any right.
Was it impatience that had driven me, because the memories of Shin Changmo held no trace of a female pro named Lee Jiah? Or was it simply the desire to mock and look down on a man who had given up his dreams to run a Go classroom — to scrape out some relative sense of superiority?
Two stones of handicap. Converted into a normal point spread, roughly fifteen points' worth of value resting on my shoulders.
Heavy. All the more so because I didn't know the precise depth of my opponent's strength.
But there was no one to blame. This was my own mistake, a weight I alone was responsible for carrying.
Across the board, my opponent sat with venom brimming in his eyes, waiting smugly for my first move. One could call his skills rusty from staying out of competition, but a professional is a professional. Apparently not confident he'd lose, he already seemed to be mulling over exactly how he'd enjoy toying with me.
"Haah…"
Whatever that man was thinking didn't particularly trouble me — I had only stepped in because I was worried about Jiah in the first place. Unless I won by any means necessary, my purpose would go unfulfilled.
In handicap Go, Black holds the initiative with stones already fixed on the star points, which means White has to approach the game in a fundamentally different way. This was not a battle between equals.
Call it regulars versus irregulars. A government army armed with state-of-the-art weapons and elite troops, arrayed against farmers and cattle herders who'd been handed nothing but a single rifle each.
Meet them on an open plain for a massive pitched battle, and you'd be annihilated to the last man.
The only hope of victory lay in scattered guerrilla warfare, waged through the mountains and densely populated ground. Keep the battlefield as wide and as numerous as possible so their forces can't concentrate. Strike deeper and more stealthily, so they can't tell friend from foe.
Reality and Go aren't identical, but the principles hold.
Give Black time to consolidate his potential territories, and prying them open becomes harder with every move. It is difficult for dissidents to run rampant in an orderly, organized society.
Conflict, division, chaos, disorder. To sow the seeds of rebellion, you must first tear the society apart at the seams.
The fires of revolution feed on a society's discord and enmity — that is how they grow.
Black had already secured the upper-right and lower-left corners. I placed my first stone on the star point of the lower-right corner. Black filled in the last remaining corner.
Three moves. Before Black could claim the top side, I drove a diagonal wedge into the upper-left corner. Rather than pincer-attacking, Black stretched out along the left side. I followed by laying another diagonal wedge into the upper-right as well, and Black once again extended a hand toward the right side.
The textbook sequence here would be to play at the center of the top side and stabilize the area. Instead, I withdrew immediately and charged into the lower-left corner.
My intent was to plunge the position into confusion and disarray — though it could also be read another way. If Black chose to cut the stones on the top side apart here, both of my wedges would have to fight for survival on their own.
"…Ha. Interesting."
Saber Instructor Kim Yoonseul let out a hollow laugh and turned to face me, his face contorted with fury. He had clearly taken it as a naked provocation — a declaration that I was confident enough to bring both separated stones to life in spectacular fashion, so let him try cutting if he dared.
The fire had been lit.
Would he answer the provocation even knowing it would introduce new variables into the game just to protect his pride? Or would he swallow the insult for now, ignore it, preserve the power of his two handicap stones, and play it safe?
"…"
After deliberating, Instructor Kim Yoonseul declined to take the bait. No doubt he'd judged that in a position where simply playing solid moves would win him the game, there was no reason to shoulder unnecessary risk.
But the heat of the insult had clearly gotten to him, because his play turned rough. It began with an invasion into the lower-right star point — the one corner I, holding White, had claimed for myself — and from there he committed to all-out war.
Pincer-attacking the stone that had invaded the left side, he completed an encirclement that looked rock-solid from the outside.
Instructor Kim Yoonseul, bold enough to pick a direct capturing race, pressed relentlessly against my weak group with aggressive, brash moves brimming with confidence.
If my weak group died while I was already behind, the game was as good as lost. But the shape was so poor that making two eyes would be difficult.
Which meant my only path to life was to poke at his isolated stones and create weaknesses of my own.
I tightened the noose of my loose encirclement, applying pressure. Kim Yoonseul too searched for his own way to live while sealing off the exits.
To the eye, White's position was agony — no visible path to survival. And it must have looked the same to Instructor Kim Yoonseul, because he pushed in aggressively to finish me off. As if victory were certain, as if he intended to end it right here, he threw everything he had into the attack.
"…"
I found myself smiling without meaning to as I placed my stone.
I had never had any intention of saving my weak group. Not the will, not the desire.
I ignored Instructor Kim Yoonseul as he came racing in to cut off my weak group's last breath, withdrew my hand from the capturing race entirely, and helped myself to profit elsewhere on the board.
Only then did he seem to sense that something was wrong, and he went back to re-examine the tangled stones.
"Uh— uh oh…"
My weak group was unquestionably dead. There was no way for it to live. But if Black went in to capture it, that itself became a suicidal move that killed Black's stones instead. The same held true in reverse: if White lunged to capture Black's eyeless group, White would be signing her own death warrant.
Whoever moved first, died. And so neither side could kill the other.
Seki — the draw position, sometimes called a mutual life. An intricate, deeply subtle shape, but it had resolved exactly as I intended.
A gun pressed to his head — but he could not pull the trigger. The moment he did, the landmine at his feet would detonate first.
So this is what ideal mutual assured destruction looks like.
He had thrown everything into the fight, and now he would walk away empty-handed. Meanwhile, I had withdrawn at my leisure having lost nothing.
Of course, the two-stone advantage was still intact. I had squeezed some profit out of resolving the seki, but on the whole Black still held the better game.
Yet what I had taken was not merely arithmetic gain.
"Kkuh…"
I had seized the momentum. I had shaken my opponent's composure to its foundations.
Instructor Kim Yoonseul, once so brimming with confidence and ease, began playing thick and conservative. One could read his intent plainly: even if it cost him a point or two here and there, he would secure exactly enough territory to guarantee a win, and nothing more.
"…"
It looked appetizing, certainly. But I had no intention of pocketing the little rice cakes he was tossing out and calling it a day.
From the earliest moves of this game, I had resolved to have nothing to do with compromise or safety.
What I craved was blood and ruin, and nothing else. I would smile atop the rubble of buildings and the mounds of heaped corpses.
The immature Ryu Seoa might lose her way amid such extreme chaos and disorder. But what about Shin Changmo?
Following the familiar paths my hand and eyes knew so well, I picked up my stone.
Before she knew it, Lee Jiah was studying a game that had reached its endgame.
It was a shambles. Every corner of the board had become a battlefield, and every battlefield had become a ruin.
She had been watching the whole time, and yet she had lost the thread long ago. Merely keeping up with what was unfolding across the board was exhausting.
"…"
Lee Jiah stole a glance at the girl sitting across from Instructor Kim Yoonseul at the board, gathering stones in her hand — unmistakably Ryu Seoa.
And yet, somehow, the Go on the board felt profoundly alien. The dissonance was strong enough that it might have been a different person playing altogether.
The WY Cup final. The NS Cup unified qualifiers. And again today, here at the hall. She had seen Ryu Seoa's Go many times now.
The girl had been immensely strong, but not flawless. There had been a certain rawness to it, occasional glimpses of clumsiness. She played many moves that ran counter to received wisdom, and she willingly embraced dangerous gambles.
But what about now?
This was Go polished to such a refinement that not a trace of rawness remained — suffocatingly conservative moves that pursued nothing but precision. The kind of Go only a mid-career professional with years of accumulated experience could produce.
The face of Lee Jiah's beloved teacher, Kim Yoonseul, was wilting like a dried flower. If he had blundered even once, his expression surely wouldn't have darkened this badly — but as far as she could tell, he had not made a single significant mistake.
The game was still fiercely contested, yet the two-stone gap had narrowed to the point where the outcome was impossible to predict. Which meant one thing: Ryu Seoa was overpowering Instructor Kim Yoonseul on pure strength.
"…"
Lee Jiah owed Instructor Kim Yoonseul a great deal, going all the way back to her childhood. She couldn't say how things might have turned out studying under anyone else, but the Lee Jiah sitting here as an Insei today existed because of him.
Her teacher was hot-tempered and authoritarian, to be sure — but if the young girl hadn't feared her teacher, she never could have digested that mountain of study and that endless string of games. For those preparing for professional status, learning Go under verbal abuse and physical punishment was commonplace.
However it happened, she had learned every last detail from the professional Kim Yoonseul, grown quickly, and distinguished herself.
Right up until two or three years ago, when she hit her wall.
She'd had no intention of blaming her environment. Nothing was uglier than shifting responsibility onto others. So she had simply consoled herself — not enough effort, bad luck — and worked harder still.
But her skill stayed frozen in place, as if effort meant nothing at all. She was so close to the next step, yet no matter how tightly she gritted her teeth and endured, she never felt herself moving forward.
The first thread of progress had come after she met Ryu Seoa at an amateur tournament she'd entered without much thought.
Her own absurd private theory — that Seoa had deliberately thrown that teaching game — was becoming reality with every move she watched now. When the girl had faced Park Pilgyu 9-dan on even terms before ultimately losing by resignation, the entire Go world had been turned on its head.
And still, the girl was hiding something more. Who knew how many more secrets Ryu Seoa was keeping? But one thing was certain.
The girl could give her something Instructor Kim Yoonseul never could.
Lingering out of gratitude and old affection would be the act of a fool. Lee Jiah made her decision: she would move forward.
All that remained was to wait and see how the game ended.
The stones were entangled so chaotically that no one could say who would win until the very last. Holding her breath, Lee Jiah followed the hands filling in the last remaining spaces.