Am curious about this and would like to hear your thoughts. Will make provisions to play more rated games in the new year (more serious games in general) and was wondering if I should start playing rated games across all boards or stick with 19x19.

What board size(s) do you play your rated games on and why?

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"Tsumegos are for reading power and Tesujis for knowing which moves to read"

What rating system are you referring to? Some online servers, for example, only allow rated games on 19x19 boards.

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be immersed

Didn't realize, that's interesting wonder what the reason is. Cheating? The question is general as relating to pros and cons playing rated games across all board sizes and not really about specific servers but, will be playing mostly smaller boards on KGS and OGS (for now) and 19x19 on IGS and Tygem.

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"Tsumegos are for reading power and Tesujis for knowing which moves to read"

FlyOrDie uses one rating for all sizes from 9x9 to 19x19 (including their "standard" 15x15).

If you want to use a real server I don't know of any that rates for smaller boards.

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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

OGS does and I thought KGS did too but double checking just now I see they don't which means this is maybe a moot point. Am inclined to keep rated games to 19x19 boards seeing that many (most?) real servers don't even allow rated play on smaller boards. Not that I was agonizing over it or anything but this was an easier decision to make than I thought it would be (glad I didn't do anything silly like make a poll). Thanks for help guys.

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"Tsumegos are for reading power and Tesujis for knowing which moves to read"

DGS allows rated games of any size. But I don't think this is a good idea. 9x9 is very different from 19x19. Nothing intrinsically wrong with rating 9x9 but I think the rating should be calculated separately from 19x19. I also think that ratings for blitz and regular should be separate.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

I have to agree with this assessment. Your whole board thinking will get you nowhere on 9x9, for example. I advocate for different ratings for blitz vs non-blitz as well, for that reason. They use different skills (unless you just blitz all your games regardless of time).

I'm sure there's better sources of info, but 9x9 can't be ranked the same as 19x19. A 5 stone handicap is huge on 9x9. I just ran 5 trials using MFOGv12, using the "3 dan" computer versus 18 kyu - 5 stone handicap, 5 minutes each (20,000 games/sec on my old i7). 4/5 white resigned.

Perhaps if we use a factor of ~4.5 as handicap, so 5 stones 9x9 ~= 22 stones 19x19, things might make more sense.

Also, on 9x9, a 2H seems less useful. At least from what I've seen, play gets centered quickly, so opposite corners often get cut or are hard to connect. On 19x19, opposite corners aren't as big of a deal. (I'm new, so this analysis is probably wrong.)

At any rate, the ranking would need to be rather different and people would need to know it isn't a perfect mapping to full size rank.

At the US Go Congress, they were playing with 2 points komi per rank difference, so 3k vs 6k would be 0.5 komi.

There is also this page, though without anything definitive:
http://senseis.xmp.net/?HandicapForSmallerBoardSizes

Interesting. Even on even 9x9 seems a spin of the roulette wheel somewhat. Still, quite a captivating and fun game to play.




Are there any good collections of pro 9x9 games available online?

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"Tsumegos are for reading power and Tesujis for knowing which moves to read"

There was a post around here somewhere pointing to dan-level 9x9 games. Can't find it right now.

Here are at least two 9x9 games (games 2 and 3) by experts.
http://www.usgo.org/learn-overview#CommentedBeginners

[comment in the first game]
"This first game is between two beginners like you. The second and third games are played by expert players like you can become.

All three games are from 'The Magic of Go' (Kiseido Press) by Cho Chikun 9-Dan and Richard Bozulich. Commentary is by Peter Shotwell adapted from his and Dr. Sangit Chatterjee's forthcoming book, 'Fire on the Lake.'"

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Thank you for the links, and for the words of encouragement.

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"Tsumegos are for reading power and Tesujis for knowing which moves to read"

It's incredibly hard to get handicaps right for 9x9 simply because our handicaps are based off 19x19. The skillsets are rather different (fighting ability and reading depth are heavily focused on in 9x9, you have to fight from early on with little thickness and normally losing the first fight puts you in serious trouble, remember you can trade life for thickness in 19x19 but in 9x9 this is usually foolhardy). On OGS's ladders it was not at all uncommon to see kyu players ranking well above most dan players and holding these spots for months. You'd really need a separate rating system for it and forget the stones idea and work with gradiations of komi and perhaps stones.

Actually I think sacrificing in clever ways can be a very powerful tactic on 9x9. I'm far from a 9x9 expert as I don't play it much, but I have noticed that often the strong monte carlo bots win by dying but getting so many forcing moves from the sacrifice they get enough of the rest of the board to win. Humans with their aversion to dying tend to overlook sacrifices like those.

There was the Ricoh pro pairgo tournament (http://www.pairgo.or.jp), with playoffs for the quarterfinal played on 9x9.

Sure, I probably phrased it all wrong. I've looked at pro 9x9 games with some amazing half-board sacrifices leading to a 0.5 point win or similar. I meant the standard invasion patterns that are common in 19x19 aren't even in 9x9 because of how small the centre is. Using the word thickness there was probably very incorrect.

playing on 9x9 has helped my 19x19 game, because I'm often afraid to invade in large open spaces, because my opponent's moyo looks so intimidating. But if I superimpose a 9x9 board over the area and think about how I would play in that local area then.. well, then it looks playable.

Cool. Didn't see an obvious way to find the game but there was an excellent photograph of Hsieh Yi Min & Satoru Kobayashi pro pair go champions for 2013 on the page. It's awesome that go has so many different ways for us to exercise and compete with each other.


Interesting discussion around the properties and possibilities of the 9x9 game. Either way the dance (fight) does seem go upon the placing of the first stones. Guess that's what makes it such an exciting game to play (will probably always play 9x9 for this reason even once grown into 19x19 as the main). Will continue to keep an eye out for pro play as well as interesting amateur games.

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"Tsumegos are for reading power and Tesujis for knowing which moves to read"

For an example, see the four "Quarterfinal Advance Determination" games given on www.pairgo.or.jp/RICOH/2005/htm/results_9x9_e.htm or www.pairgo.or.jp/RICOH/2005/htm/games_e.htm (in ugi format). Using creative variation of the URL (or via Google) you can find results from other years. For SGFs see www.cwi.nl/~aeb/go/games/games/RicohPG

Wonderful. Thanks!

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"Tsumegos are for reading power and Tesujis for knowing which moves to read"