This seems like a silly question that probably has a simple answer, but here is the question: How can you select which color you want to play on KGS? A friend and I have played six games over the last week and I have played White five out of the six times. Over the course of six games our rankings have been 14k & 15k, 14k each, 13k & 14k, and now 13k each. The komi has varied from 6.5 to .5. I don't object to playing White but I wonder why the games don't switch colors randomly. I also wonder if there is anything that I or my friend can do to manually switch colors. I have looked on the KGS help page and couldn't find any information on this subject. Any help is appreciated. Thank you.

It seems to me that, if the two players have different ranks, then the server always makes the stronger player white (with komi 0.5). If they are the same rank, it seems to choose randomly who is black and who is white (and in this case white gets 6.5 komi). There probably is a way to manually override this, but if so I don't know how. If you happen to be the same rank, you can always just both close the invitation window if it assigns you colours other than the ones you want, and try again - sooner or later it must give you the colours you wanted

Click the stone with a question-mark next to your names when they join the game, it switches it from random to color choice

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Thank you very much!