“The game has to be recessed,” I have heard that the Master said before
he went into St. Luke’s, “but I don’t want outsiders looking at an unfinished
game and saying that White is doing well and Black is doing all right too.”
It was the sort of thing the Master would have said; but there are
probably shifts in the tides of battle that are quite impossible for an outsider
to understand.
Apparently the Master was optimistic. Once after the match was over he
remarked to Goi of the Nichinichi and myself: “When I went into the
hospital I didn’t think White was in at all a bad position. I did think some
odd things were happening, but I was not really worried.”
Black 99 “peeped in”
upon a White triangle, and with White 100, the
last play before he was hospitalized, the Master joined his stones.
Afterwards, in his review of the game, he said that if he had not so joined
his stones but rather sought to control the Black formation to the right of
the board and prevent an incursion into White territory, “the outlook would
not have been such as to permit sanguineness on Black’s part.” He seems to
have been satisfied with the early course of the game. The fact that he had
been able to play White 48 on a “star point” and so to “control the passes”
in the opening stages “meant what anyone must concede to be an ideal
White formation.” It followed, he said, that “Black 47, giving up the
strategic point, was too conservative a play,” which could not “evade
charges of a certain tepidness.”
Otaké, however, in his own reflections, said that if he had not played as
he did there would still have been openings for White in the vicinity, and
these he was loath to permit. Wu’s commentary agreed with Otaké’s. Black
47 was the proper play, he said, and left Black with massive thickness.
