“Don’t run with scissors” is a saying that in GO means don’t try to escape across the board with a series of small knight's moves, as they can easily be “cut”! Of course, I was told not to run with scissors at the age of 3, and ever since I have never done so. I still hold scissors pointy end down, gripped firmly in my fist, and walking slowly as if through a minefield—as I was taught in kindergarten. Why, then, why do I continue to run across the GO board with scissors???
(The black stones with their series of small knight's moves towards the center of the board is (probably) an example of "running with scissors. I'll leave it to your imagination whether or not I won this game.)
I think I’m being light, “dancing” with these cool moves! But no, every single time, 50–100 moves later, my opponents cut me to shreds. Next game, I do it again! My only hope in these situations is that I kill something of theirs FIRST! That way they never get a chance to attack me. Sometimes this works, but then I feel like I’m “fighting with scissors.” Sure, scissors have a pointy end, but if my opponent has good shape and thickness, then it’s like beating against a brick wall with, well, a pair of scissors.
Scissors can cut paper; they are beat by rock. I’m not sure on the math of jan-ken-pon, but I feel like you only have a 33.3% chance of winning with scissors, and that is what happens to me if I run with scissors across the GO board. It only works a third of the time—and only when it’s my opponent who chooses to “run with paper.”
“Running with paper” is my own GO idiom, which means using shapes weaker, thinner than scissors. For example, early in my GO career, back in the 90's, I believe it was Janice Kim who once gave a lecture showing common shapes between two stones and estimating how connected they really were. Like—and this is totally from my memory, so apologies to Janice if I’m screwing this up—but she said the small knight’s move was 75% connected, the one-space jump 90% connected, and the large knight's move 50% connected, and things like that. This may have been part of her discussion on haengma, aka “the way of the moving horse.” My style is “the way of the running scissors.”
Come to think of it, don’t trust my memory at all on this, since even after being told “don’t run with scissors” AND that the small knight’s move is only 75% connected, I still use it constantly to escape across the board. I am clearly not a reliable narrator in all of this. But the point I’m straining for is still valid: if my opponent’s shape is too thin, and if I attack first, I can hit their paper-thin moyos with my fierce scissors. But of course, if their shape is good and they have thickness, it is like throwing “scissors” against “rock.” I’ll lose jan-ken-pon every time. At this point, I can’t remember which game I am writing about: am I saying that GO is like jan-ken-pon, or the other way around? I’ve already admitted that I keep playing a losing hand by “running with scissors” and that I can’t remember exactly what Janice Kim said—or, come to think of it, if it was Janice Kim who said it!
And all this is just a long-winded and feeble-minded way of saying my wife doesn’t let me use scissors around the house. “You’ll cut yourself,” she says, and of course, she’s right.