If you are worried about having an opportunity to play games with an opening, and everyone is game for it, you can just play an opening, and then end the game and discuss it when it is hopeless. I recall doing that from time to time against stronger players at my old club. As long as everyone understands the arrangement, it works fine.

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Occupy Babel!

The odds are that the "real strategy" you are learning by playing a 5-kyu player with no handicap stones is not good strategy. There is no insult there to 5-kyu players. Open board strategies are hard even for pros! Reading a opening problem book will likely be more helpful.

This is all quite natural. As players get stronger, they learn what to do as their advantage in an area gets smaller. A 5 dan and 5 kyu might have somewhat similar opinions about how to play as black on 9 stones in the opening, but could have dramatically different opinions on 6 stone games. The idea is that what your opponent teaches you during a review is more likely to be correct if handicap stones are involved.

That said, I do not see the reverse komi as a bad thing necessarily. It is somewhat easier to track smaller progress with reverse komi and it might expand the set of people who want to play against you. Furthermore, placing stones on an empty board is fun in a unique way that cannot be replicated. There is some artistic feeling in it. Having fun helps learning a lot. I would only encourage you to mix it up by playing with handicap stones half of the time (or flip a coin every time). You might find yourself using what you gained in handicap games and applying it to 0 stone games.

That said, this whole issue might be moot soon. 16-kyu players do not stay 16-kyu for very long. If you have a bunch of friendly people you can play with you can improve fairly quickly.

I do love handicap games though. They teach you about different strategic parts of the game progressively. If you ever get a teacher, I would encourage you to stick with handicap stones for that reason. I would rather not play reverse komi games at a club because even games are easy to get online.

Thank you everyone for the advice. I'll be playing most of my games with the nine stone handicap from now on. Thanks again!

Sorry that this is coming late, but I haven't had my copy of Lessons with me this past week. I am pleased to have it back and I wanted to double check this without simply saying "No, Kageyama never said that" only to be proven wrong. I completely agree with the idea that weaker players need to be unafraid of cutting - if handicap stones give them the confidence they need to cut then they are helping.

An overall theme of Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go is that one needs to learn to read and be confident in that. Kageyama would never tell players to simply "cut first, ask questions later" as that goes against a fundamental: you need to read. A cut may not be good. Only reading can tell you when this is the case.

In chapter 2 Kageyama says "Cut where you can cut" in the context of the proverb "Don't peep when you can cut." This could be confused with the idea of "cut first, ask questions later." But it isn't the same. Kageyama does not say that all cuts are good. In the context of this thread, he does say that, when facing a stronger player, one should not be afraid to play a cut. And I agree that To assume he's saying one should always cut would be to ignore his advice throughout the rest of the book emphasizing the importance of reading and dealing with fundamentals in context. For example, he does say one should always answer a peep. Then he quickly gives a counter-example of not answering a peep as an early-game ko threat.

In Attack and Defense, Davies and Ishida discuss the strategy of cuts in their own chapter 2. "When you cut off something your opponent can afford to give up, the cut may actually be counter-productive, helping him to strengthen his position."


Don't be so quick to jump upon popular opinion. There is much to be learned from a reverse komi game, in spite of what many here seem to believe.

Bringing this all back to the topic of handicap stones and reverse komi: good lessons on cutting can really be learned in a reverse komi game. In fact, I think a weak player might gain a better understanding of cuts in a reverse komi game than they would with stones. Of course, only if they truly understand what their handicap means.

Many players are not only afraid to cut, they are afraid to be cut. And when they are cut they will do anything - no matter the cost - to save both groups. Handicap stones do not help fight this instinct, as Kageyama discusses later in chapter 2. He mentions a 9 stone handicap game he played with a student. The student believed that, as long as everything lived, he couldn't lose. This is wrong. He let himself get cut apart and lost because of his handicap stones. This same thing has happened to some of my opponents - I will give them more stones, but it doesn't narrow my margin of victory. They become overprotective of those stones and let me dominate all the fighting in spite of their advantage.

This lesson of sacrifice can be learned in an even better way through a reverse komi game. Sometimes, for the sake of the whole board, you need to make a sacrifice. If you don't understand what your reverse komi means, you'll still try to save everything. But if you know that you are able to give up something because of your territorial advantage (which is really what a reverse komi boils down to) then a cut can quickly become a bad cut for your opponent. And you will have learned a valuable lesson that can be applied to real games where you are ahead and your opponent tries to cut something off which can be sacrificed.

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"You have to walk before you can run. Black 1 was a walking move.
I blushed inwardly to recall the ignorant thoughts that had gone through
my mind before, when I had not realized the true worth of Black 1."
-Kageyama Toshiro on proper moves