Comment by FartyMcFarter
2 hours ago
The trouble is that in chess, if one player deviates significantly that can often still mean they have a playable (perhaps slightly worse) position which has to either be memorised or understood on the spot, which can be really difficult. The main line is not the only playable line.
Is this also the case for Go's joseki? Or is any deviation easy to punish?
It is the same. If you are not a pro punishing deviations is quite difficult (but can occasionally be easy like I'm sure it can be in chess with hanging pieces). The most obvious difficult punish example is just finding unintuitive ways to capture or suppress their stones (analogy: multi move trick captures or getting a better position). But it can be more subtle, sometimes the answer to a deviation is just to not directly punish, but just accept that their shape is slightly inefficient. But if you know they deviated incorrectly, you can be tempted to try to attack hard to directly punish when the line doesn't exist (and then you overplay). Another example of a difficult punish is to just ignore their move and make progress on a different of the board, challenging them to prove their move was actually a threat. You can kind of do that in chess with parallel pawnstorms, but it is much more common in Go.