Aguilar takes 3 stones!

Erinys is a new 9d on KGS, registering on June 30, 2009. He has played 19 games counting this one with an impressive record of 18-1. The only game he lost was to Javaness [2d] at 6 stones handicap. He seems to only play blitz games. Not much is known about him, but his client seems to indicate he is Japanese.

In this game, he manages to give aguilar (The famous Fernando Aguilar) 3 stones! Maybe aguilar is not very good at blitz, in any case I rarely see aguilar playing fast games.

The game seems uneventful to begin with since aguilar avoids the taisha joseki in the top left corner. However, Black's hane tactic of 18 may be questionable. The result is that White connects with O17 whereas Black does not gain much. He is forced to cut with 28 to seek benefit. Instead of this stragety, it seems much easier to tenuki and take a big point on the bottom. In any case, a big center fight starts and eventually White cleverly invades with 37. Then White plays 39 and 41 to induce Black to defend his corner before exploding with the peep of 43, initiating a powerful double attack on Black's two weak groups. It seems that Black should have defended his groups instead of protecting the corner. After some intense fighting, right when it looked like Black was about to kill White's side group, White surprises him with the wedge of 67, effectively saving his group and severely threatening Black's. It leads to part of Black's center being captured. Black makes things worse with 80 and even more stones are captured. Through 95, White has carved out a monstrous piece of territory on the left side.

White invades Black's moyo deeply with 99 before surprising Black again with 103, cutting Black's center group. Black 104 is very confusing however, I cannot understand why he wants to play there instead of defending the center. In any case, after 113, Black's center is the one being chased whereas White had gotten very strong shape. Again Black neglects his weaker group with 116, though in any case he does not have enough territory if he defends. The game progresses to Black 130, which is a very nice tesuji that destroys most of the eyeshape of White's lower group, forcing it to only two eyes. However, Black overplays with 150, leading to a right-side group of his being captured. When Black ran out of time nearly 60 moves later. White was very much ahead.

What do you think? I think that White is not one of these fake high dans that is popping up everywhere on KGS recently. He has shown that he has very strong intuition and reads very fast. He has also beaten Hutoshi twice and Bangboss once. The only problem is that we have yet to see erinys [9d] face off against any 8 or 9 dans on KGS. Hopefully we will see this soon in the future to gauge his real strength.