It was not even a matter of choice of behaviour, but the game naturally evolved into killing all. 13x13, H4, white opening established two central cutting lines dividing the board into four separate parts. From then on, killing some corner is the natural choice. If Black is careless, then every cut's ending near an edge kills two corners simultenously. Almost automatically, everything died.

For this kind of strategic development, you can only argue whether I should have deliberately made mistakes and let Black revive part of his killed groups. In serious games, as that game was, I consider such unethical.

I do not even understand the problem you are having with killing everything. When I was Black in handicap games, I was happy to learn much when losing badly. Losing badly is a great chance to learn much!



I do not think so. What obviously (from the expression of his face) distressed him was how Japanese scoring was done or maybe how - in his opinion - it favoured the stronger player able to show the more interesting variations.



He was already 13 kyu - not an absolute beginner any more. A 13 kyu must be able to tolerate losing part of his games badly.

Also see above.

In particular, I disagree completely. In a serious, serious strategy is called for.



That you have a different opinion on playing (or not playing?) serious games against beginners does not require to let it be a matter of ethics. Regardless of the scoring method used, every two players deciding to play a game can choose for themselves whether it shall be a serious game or a teaching game, whether teaching after the game is desired or not etc.



Ok, then I understand that you manage to explain them to beginners reasonably well for your perceived standards.

You've got me there. I haven't done a statistical study. I can point to many posts from different teachers on this forum alone, or to the many posts from beginners who get confused by Japanese "dead" stones, or to the many posts by people who gave up on Go for years before trying again, but I can't give you statistics.

I can also easily explain the logical conundrum and the practical issues involving agreement between two players who have just learned the rules, but I still can't give you statistics.

But then again, you haven't given any statistics either except for your own unconfirmable report.



Except that wasn't your full argument or the full arguments of the posts I responded to heatedly. When you finally did make the argument about playing others with the same ruleset, I acknowledged it.



I didn't say your opinion was a lie. What was a lie was the statement, "I'm not trying to trivialize the problem, it is quite capable of that all by itself." Your many posts in argument of triviality attest otherwise. This is kind of post that I bluntly respond to and then get called out on for being aggressive, as if your statement wasn't.

Did he say that area scoring would help? If we're talking about unplayed tesujis, etc. after dame are filled, those are just reading deficiencies that would be present regardless of which scoring method is used. It would be interesting to do the same study on scoring. What would be needed? A large number of video of players scoring the endgame?

I always found it hard to understand why people beleive Japanese rules put people off learning the game. If you look at Japan or Korea, it seems that there are plenty of people playing there. I think that people who can't explain to others how to play Go are a greater cause of putting people off learning the game. There are many people who learnt from inadequate documents which tried to describe how to play. The result was that they didn't.

As to which ruleset you want to use, either Chinese or Japanese. I still see no reason to use AGA.

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North Lecale

I'm not Eric van der Werf, but I did at one point go through my games and came out with about 1% that would have benefited from playout rules because of a dispute. I mentioned it already once on this forum in this post. An excerpt from the link within that post:

As I said - there are many bad teachers out there.
It takes more to be a 'teacher' than just to swing a beginner around.

Personally, I find it much harder to retain a beginner when I tech non-common rules than the common ones. And by that I mean - the ones used around or not. To me, this is much more important than strict adherence to once specific scoring method.

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- Bantari
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Nope.
He admonished him because, from Robert's context, we thought it was a teaching game which Robert treated as a contest - a behavior not worthy of a teacher.
Later Robert backpedalled and explained that that was *not* a teaching game, but a contest game, but this is neither here nor there.

In any case, crushing beginners by killing all their stones some consider a very bad manners, regardless if the game is teaching or not. And it has nothing to do with 'playing to their level'. Please do not distort half of what you quote. I know you are very passionate about 'area scoring' and that you think its the best thing since sliced bread, but its really not such a big deal, dude. So chill out, yes?

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I'm glad.



I am not sure of the origin of this online impatience. I remember when it was usual to pay for online time by the minute, and it was quite expensive by comparison with today. But confusion about life and death is the norm for double digit kyu players (DDKs), and any experienced player who plays them and considers it a waste of time to play things out or explain things to them should be put out of their misery, IMHO. I appreciate your diffidence, but you are well worth it.

When I was 4 kyu, for my birthday a friend gave me a book of Go Seigen's games. OC, the game records almost all ended with dame unfilled, and if there was a final ko fight, only the result was indicated, not the plays in the fight. I discovered, to my dismay, that I was often unable to verify the score. The reason, OC, was that I was not seeing the necessity for some protective plays. And, although not yet a dan player, I was above average.

Filling dame correctly takes a fair amount of skill, certainly more than a DDK has.* That is true, regardless of the rules used. When I learned go it was the custom to fill dame informally and to point out protective plays as necessary. I do not play online, but I gather that that is not the case with online play. (It would not be so easy to program, I suppose.) Besides, since dame filling takes skill, it should be normal to fill dame when playing online.

The Japanese '89 rules have a clever provision that almost mandates filling dame before ending play, and since then I always do so. By contrast with filling dame informally, it does not add much time, if any, before the game is scored. And it removes any nagging doubts about whether a player saw the need for a protective play. (The J89 rules have an escape clause that allowed pros to continue the practice of filling dame informally. But accidents have happened, even to pros. ). Were I to play online I would fill the dame, and if doing so annoyed my opponent, I would consider that his problem, not mine.

As for DDKs, my advice is this:

Never resign. And always play out the dame.

If you play out the dame, it is a good bet that your opponent will be able to take advantage of your missing a protective play, or that you will be able to teach your opponent a lesson.

----

* Perhaps someone should write a book, Dame Filling for Dummies. It would probably be more useful for DDKs than books on life and death.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Thanks for sharing that. It must have taken some time. Hmm. These 1% to 2% error rates aren't particularly alarming. If a 30% one-way bias is equivalent to a 1-stone difference in rating, 1-2% is barely notable. There was one point in my go career when I decided that losing games on time wasn't worth fixing as long is it was under 15%. (And I probably would have set a higher number except that some opponents believe it is rude to lose on time and would insult me.)

Then there is the TD headache for tournaments. At 1-2% this is a couple of games per tournament for a medium-sized tournament that need some intervention if players don't work it out themselves. Seems about par for the course, but YMMV.

Question not directed at me, but I try to answer anyhow, its a slow morning:

1. Because your behavior led to a person leaving a club and never coming back. We do not have the luxury of too many beginners, so alienating them like you did is not good. And, knowing you, and with all due respect - I can easily imagine your 'bedside manner' to have cause the problem. You can be really difficult and hard to take when you get into your Vulcan mode, which is what I think has happened in that case.
2. Not in itself. But there are many ways to win a game, especially when you are so much stronger that you can actually kill every stone. Also, once you notice where the game is going, you can always try to turn it into a teaching game, even an informal one.
3. And how did others in the club managed it? I cannot believe you got to be so much stronger than a 13k, a regular club goer, without running into such situation before, or without witnessing such situation before. And if you have not - this in itself tells us a lot about the magnitude of the problem, no?
4. Nope, you are off the hook for this one. At most, one could say that the painfully obvious did not occur to you. Having blinders is not a reprehensible social behavior, so you're ok on this count. Really, painfully obvious. You never analyze the game afterwards? Just analyze the final position... I mean - really.
5. Nope. Preference of scoring method is just a preference, it has nothing to do with behavior. A reprehensible social behavior would be, for example, when you *insist* that everybody around you follow *your* personal preference even when they don't want to.

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- Bantari
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Here you go:

http://eidogo.com/#3Db69KhOn
http://eidogo.com/#kJqUQtFL
http://eidogo.com/#3ffaI941
http://eidogo.com/#3oPyn2gv1
http://eidogo.com/#cXM4LI4v
http://eidogo.com/#26UxjAhqL
http://eidogo.com/#v4U3OIO8
http://eidogo.com/#3wjih8zql

EDIT: And PaperTiger's commentary on those (in the same order):

@Uzziel - have you had a chance to ask for help on KGS yet? (If so, what rooms did you try, and were they helpful?)

I hope this debate has taught you, if nothing else, that playing a lot of go makes many people very, very passionate about the game. And maybe just a litttttle bit nerdy.


I am aware of a class of L&D problems (and especially, endgame problems) where status and/or correct play depends on dame. And you're definitely right that, as you get higher and higher in the kyu grades, the problems you see are more likely to involve stones that could live, if not for a shortage of liberties situation that suddenly arises at the end of the game because a dame is filled. But for the vast majority of unsettled groups still on the board during scoring are not in 5k games, they are in 15k, 20k, 25k games. And these are groups that may have been unsettled since the opening!



Sometimes I wonder whether anything lower than 10%-20% doesn't need to be fixed. If I'm not using the main time in the middlegame and continue to think hard and count carefully in the endgame, maybe I'm just not focusing. [/offtopic]

I guess I was unclear. If a protective play is needed, the life and death of some stones is unsettled, and that is what I was talking about. It is not a rules issue.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I am sorry dude, but this one line pretty much invalidates you as a conversation partner, in my book.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

I consider the difference between rule sets, for the purpose of teaching beginners, trivial. It exists, area scoring is slightly nicer, but in the big scheme of things it is trivial. In my opinion, therefore, it is not possible to trivialize the difference, because how do you trivialize something that is trivial?

That's why, on average, it is much easier THERE to explain the game to beginners despite territory scoring.

Good point.

Some years ago I took a look at online game records where both players were around 10 kyu. In the overwhelming majority of cases one or both players missed a protective play (and often more than one).

As for your point about unsettled groups earlier in the game, my eyes were opened when, as a 7 kyu playing against a 5 kyu, I made a ko threat to threaten to kill a group, only to discover that I had actually killed it!

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Nobody else is doing it, so I suppose I have to remind the squabblers that you can and should play out the games under Japanese rules if you are unsure whether a group is dead. One side can pass of course, and so make a gain if his judgement was correct - a reward for his skill that is lacking under area rules.

Furthermore, it is not normal to play out even under Chinese rules. The dame will be filled, yes, but "dead" stones can be picked up and tossed away even if they are alive, and so beginners (and others) can make exactly the same mistakes as under Japanese rules. Under Chinese rules an unconfident player can ploddingly kill off each group in a formal way by removing each liberty, but he does not get punished for this. Boo! This, along with filling in the dame, also drags the game out quite a bit, which can be an important factor in a club situation where someone else may be waiting to play, and where you try to get in, say, three games a night rather than two.

The true arguments between J and C rules are not to do with any of this, but with freak situations or arbitrary (yet maybe sensible) rulings on things like bent four and triple ko.

Also to be pointed out again: the BGA and AGA may have adopted AGA rules, but except in certain tournaments virtually nobody there uses them. They mostly stick with Japanese rules, and by choice not coercion (or, as with Ing rules, a form of bribery).

No-one is sure why the Chinese switched to area rules in the Ming, but the strongly favoured view is that it was to do with the rise of gambling go. Captured stones in candle-lit rooms and with servants hovering over the board had a habit of disappearing. The solution was to make captured stones not matter. Chicanery is just as widespread on today's servers, of course, but surely is no longer a good reason for deciding which rules to teach beginners. As Hermann says, go with the flow, use Japanese/Korean rules, and put all your freed-up mental energy into being nice to that guy sitting patiently waiting to play.

At any rate it's a lot better than impersonating chicken-licken and rushing round saying the sky's going to fall in just because a friendly but otherwise utterly trivial game between two beginners very occasionally has an imperfect ending.

And to those teachers who claim to have had bemused students under Japanese rules, did you simply tell them they could play on and see for themselves whether stones were really to be treated as dead or not? Or did you, and not the rules, bemuse them polishing your own ego: pointing out that Black of course could have done this, or used that tesuji, even though it's hard to see except for an "expert like me"?

Robert,
Your personal preference is well known. But the facts, as presented, are as follows:

1. there are (some) people who have issues teaching beginners, and sometimes they blame it on the scoring method or rules used
2. there are (many) people who have no trouble and a lot of success teaching beginners regardless of the scoring method rules used
3. there are huge areas of the world where Go is popular and beloved and successful regardless of the scoring method or rules used

This facts point me to the most likely conclusion that: some people who try to teach beginners are just bad teachers and they try to blame it on scoring method or the rules. I have stated it before, and all new information I see points more and more in the same direction.

So, my position is, I repeat:

• Area scoring might make teaching slightly easier.
• For bad teachers - this is a BIG FREAKING DEAL - they can't do otherwise.
• For good teachers - it does not matter all that much - they get results either way.

The more I read and the more I learn, the more I am convinced that the above is true.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Both kinds of arguments are "true": those about the most basic removals and those about the ultimately fine print.



Nowadays, since we use the internet and everybody has heard of such ideas, it is very much different from what it was in those bad old days (TM) when we knew nothing.