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V. Life and Death
 
The first thing that every Go player must learn, after the rules, is how to tell when stones are alive and when they are dead. Life-and-death struggles between enemy stones happen all the time, and they are one of the most interesting parts of the game.

Figure 21: One Eye is Dead
In Figure 21, above, the black stones have an eye at A. (An eye is a single liberty surrounded by a string of stones.) As we saw before, White cannot play a stone into this eye because of the suicide rule, unless White first plays a stone at B to put the black stones into atari. Then White would be allowed to play inside the eye and capture the black stones. Since Black can't stop White from playing B and then A, these black stones are dead. But what if there are two eyes?

Figure 22: Two Eyes are Alive
In Figure 22, above, the black stones have two eyes. White can't play at C because that would not capture the black stones (they would still have another liberty at D). But White can't play at D either, for the same reason. So these stones are alive, and there is no way for White to ever capture them. This gives us the most important principle in the game of Go:
A group of stones is alive if it can make two separate eyes.
In actual games, things usually get a bit more complicated. Often, a player's stones will not all be connected together as they were in Figure 22. Instead, there will be several strings of stones gathered close together to form a group of stones. Sometimes these groups can form two eyes, and be alive. But something that looks like an eye may turn out to be a false eye if the stones are not connected, and the stones may be dead instead of alive.

Figure 23: Alive Groups
In Figure 23, all of the groups of black stones are alive. Although each group is made up of two or three separate strings of stones which are not actually connected, each of these strings has two or three liberties, and White cannot capture any of them. The important thing is that each string of stones must help to form at least two of the eyes, and thus be protected from capture. But if any string of stones is next to only one eye, then those stones are not safe from being captured, and that eye is called a false eye.

Figure 24: False Eyes
In Figure 24, the black groups look like they have two eyes, but they don't. The stones marked with X's are protected by only one eye (marked with an A), and in fact they are already in atari. White can play A to capture the marked stones, and so A is not a real eye, but only a false eye, and all of these groups of black stones are dead. You may think that there are ko fights in the last two groups, but these are not real ko fights, either, because Black has no way to win them. If Black plays at A to save the stone marked X (the usual way to win a ko fight), that will just put more of the black stones into atari (and give White an extra captive, too). In the last example, B also turns out to be a false eye, because some of the stones around it are not next to any other eye (A is not an eye, remember). This sort of chain reaction is common. If an eye turns out to be a false eye, then it no longer protects the stones next to it, and this may make other eyes that are next to those stones false, and so on. Every stone in a group must be protected by two real eyes.
 

 

 

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