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Counting Liberties and Winning Capturing Races
By Richard Hunter
Published by Slate & Shell
Reviewed by Dennis Hardman
November 3, 2003

This book deals with the rather narrow (but valuable) techniques of winning localized life-and-death fights occurring between groups of stones where it is a race to see which group lives and which group dies. The book describes the basics of what actually counts as a liberty, categories of liberties (e.g., inside vs. outside), how these liberties figure in the fight, and the types of fights that can occur (Type 1, Type 2 with a Ko on the outside liberties, etc.). It provides the reader with "formulas" for evaluating a fight without having to explicitly read out every line of play. The trick is to correctly count the number and type of liberties to determine the type of fight so that one can ultimately apply the "formula". Later chapters show how the techniques are used in realistic fighting situations, and provide about 50 problems and several commented professional games to drive the concepts home. Well written and nicely laid out, I would recommend this book to players of all strengths, particularly those with a mid-kyu ranking. However, this book should be valuable to even the strongest player because, as the preface points out, "Many players, even quite strong ones, have a poor grasp of these fundamentals." http://www.slateandshell.com/

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