Sasha Chapin @sashachapin

So before I played Petrosian again, less than a year after the defeats described above, I spoke with Spassky, who was playing in the same tournament in Yugoslavia. He counseled me that the key was to apply pressure, but just a little, steadily. “Squeeze his balls,” he told me in an unforgettable turn of phrase. “But just squeeze one, not both!”

Through repetitive study of game patterns, they had learned to do what Chase and Simon called “chunking.” Rather than struggling to remember the location of every individual pawn, bishop, and rook, the brains of elite players grouped pieces into a smaller number of meaningful chunks based on familiar patterns.

There is nothing explicit in the rules of Go that says a group of stones with two eyes can’t be captured. Rather, that fact arises solely from subtle interactions of the game’s atomic parts. It’s no accident, therefore, that life and death are themselves core concepts in the game. Stones are said to be alive when they can never be captured, like th