I read this on sensei's library aboud Wbaduk: "In general, the playing strength on Wbaduk is quite different from KGS. My feeling is that Wbaduk players have been playing all their life, so they know a lot of the fundamentals[...]In particular, do not expect a Wbaduk player to let you get away with a silly tactical blunder, even if he is 20K. "

I don't know how true this is over time, but after playing several games this week, I tend to agree. I didn't find them any stronger relative to KGS, but some of these players with 20 000 games clearly know the ropes. Every blunder I made was neatly punished, while on KGS low dan/sdk try to be fancier.

I think using SE during the game is great. When I play faster games online, I'd much rather spend my time thinking more about each move than using it to count every 5 or 10 moves. Plus, in a slow serious tournament game it's not challenging to count the board as accurately as a computer can. So as long as you learn how to count for slower games, there is no point wasting your time doing it every game you play.

That being said, I am a dan-level player on Oro. I think that from experience I can usually tell who is winning without even counting the board. Maybe it would be best for DDK or weak SDK players to count themselves, but after that point I feel that it really isn't necessary to do. Especially, if you just remember that in a tournament game you will have much more time to count for yourself.

Just how rampant are sandbaggers on Wbaduk? I've been losing many games lately (dropped three ranks) and my personal feeling is that it is a mix of being sandbagged and a lack of confidence in my game as a result. It sucks! I don't understand why players do this.

I suspect that there are other players like me -- my enjoyment of the game depends on how I perceive that I played (win or lose). Of course, everyone loses, and when you lose to an opponent similar in strength you are able to review the game and learn what your mistakes were. If you play against an opponent much stronger than you there usually isn't one or a few clear mistakes but an accumulation of smaller mistakes that results in the loss. These mistakes are more difficult to see without help so ultimately I feel like the whole game was a waste of time and I feel frustrated. I also suffer from a lack of confidence as a result of doubt (was I really sandbagged or am I just regressing). Of course, if you enjoy playing weaker opponents with even games then why not just use your dan account? I'm sure many weaker player (even myself as long as I knew what I was getting into) would enjoy playing a much stronger opponents.

I think a good rating system should be difficult to sandbag. One of the things I like about KGS is that you can't put in a start rating, it just looks at your play history. I also think many rating systems aren't responsive enough. In Magicwand's example, he won 16 games in a row, but only went up two stones? When I'm playing people in really life, we usually switch handicaps after 3 wins in a row, so 16 wins would push 5 stones difference.

It's still possible to sandbag by resigning rated games, but it would more difficult. A clever system might disregard resignations in the first 20 moves or so (or weight them less) to prevent people from easily sandbagging.

You can still sandbag. Play fast games, resign after 100 moves. The only thing that has much of a chance is active moderation, and even that might not scale. Compare what it takes to combat spammers.

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Occupy Babel!

If you lose to a sandbagger just look at it as an opportunity to play against a stronger player and move on to the next game. I agree that sandbagging is lame.. but if someone really wants to sandbag they won't improve and it will only hurt their go.

Riiiiseeeee, dead thread, again!

Sorry, just read through this whole 'pre-play' thingy and if you are really able to use it while PLAYING (not just if you're a spectator) must say that I consider using it turning the game into a "Go variant" rather than Go, because I'm pretty sure in the original version of Go you don't play on auxiliary boards anywhere else except in your Mind.

In other words, it's a cheap way of cheating. There, I said it.
Not your opponent since both can use it but rather yourself if you think you're "playing Go".

I believe you can turn it on with a checkbox when setting up the game; by default preplay is impossible in a game that you are playing. SE, however, is on by default. It's off in my default settings, and therefore off in about 50% of my games. I don't mind playing with it on if that's the way my opponent offers the game, however, since:

1. It's not that useful. I don't try to use it.

2. I figure that a number of players don't use it, they just leave it on because it's default. It also costs 'betting points' to use, I believe. The little cartoon characters will indicate when SE is being used, and it's not used that often by my opponents. Most usually they use SE when they are doublechecking that it's time to resign. More power to them, there.

3. I'm not playing in a deeply competitive fashion, to settle who's the stronger player. If they use it to their advantage, they are a functionally stronger player. That's fine. I treat Wbaduk opponents mostly as a black box anyway; it's not the most social server for Western types. The rating system is a lot lighter and more fluid than on kgs, too. When it doesn't take months of games to persuade the server that your account is playing at a higher level, and when automatch games are so easy to get, it seems harder to get worked up about occasional 'unfair' losses.


Your mileage may vary, however, depending on the rank that you play at.

A problem I have with Wbaduk is that when I do win - or rather have a won game - quite often my opponent refuses to agree on what stones are dead or to play out the sequences to prove it and the thing goes on forever.

It's hard enough getting a win fair and square there as the standard is high but it's frustrating not getting it when I do come out on top.

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John Collins

these guys playin on Wabuk are really unbelieveable:

in the first 5 games they just made one overplay after the other, smashing stones on the board until your freedoms are gone. they didn`t care about joseki, making good shape or fuseki.

then i adopted to their style and beat 2 of them.
result: at the end they played every single stone, even within my alive groups .
so i passed 10 times until they finally agreed to count.



and at the counting of course they didn`t agree on the dead stones.
i called for the admin, but he wasn`t online (is he ever?).

finally, i had to leave the game (so i was the official escaper) to play another one, cuz they keep waiting for you to resign.

this doesn`t seem to be a rare problem:
Unfortunately, it is still possible to cheat on Cyberoro. Fairly regularly people refuse to end the scoring portion of the game by refusing to agree on dead groups. Since the clock is no longer running, this disagreement can last indefinitely. One can get an admin to adjudicate the game, but this is not so easy as the "call help" button doesn't seem to work and when in a game room it is not clear how to go to the main chat room to ask for help.
http://senseis.xmp.net/?WBaduk

my opinion: guys playing on wbaduk are 70% sandbaggers, the 20% non-sandbaggers are unable to take loss like a man, and i don`t want to waste my go playing time to search for the normal 10%.

my decision: i stopped playing there and will stick to KGS.
but their homepage is quite good, so i ll have one or more looks there (without playin baduk).

@Kansai-ben Wbaduk ranks are much more accurate at higher levels. Don't let this discourage you from playing there. There is much to be learned countering such an aggressive style.

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"Those who calculate greatly will win; those who calculate only a little will lose, but what of those who don't make any calculations at all!? This is why everything must be calculated, in order to foresee victory and defeat."-The Art of War

I can't help but feel there's a lot to be learned from that.

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We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

hmmm ... maybe you are right. i shouldn`t care about my ranking there but just try 2 learn .... hmm ...

@ nagano ... do u live in nagano?





learn how to fight massive overplay ... yes
learn "a lot" .... probably not. fighting is important, but its not everything in go. especially for me as i am a kind of aesthetic go player (eg i like lee chanho`s playing style)

I'm pretty sure that aesthetic go style comes after mastering fighting style. IIRC, it's true for Lee Chang Ho (he developped his style after having tried to outfight his master) and Takemiya.

i love and hate it how they often have no regard for a quite and balanced development but aggressively cut everything und skillfully (and often succesfully) hunt down even strong groups.
Actually all that I hate about their game reminds me of my own style/flaws. But huge fights and terrible losses really are a lot of fun ...

When you run on Linux, is there a way to watch Wbaduk games ? (not play, just watch)

At least at one point, wine worked.

Also you can find and compile the source for qgo2 which would then work natively. I think development stopped a while ago, but it did work.

Wbaduk works with wine in Ubuntu 11.04, and I assume it will also work in any other modern linux distro.

It works in wine for me on 10.04. I was having some problems with the program crashing 6 months - 1 year ago when I first installed it, but recent releases seem to have mostly fixed that.

I still have yet to play a game there, though I've been able to watch without problems.

sometimes after a game ends in counting and we both agreed which groups are dead, I get hundreds of identical error messages "Klasse nicht registriert" (class not registered) and I have to manually kill the process.

this started only a few weeks ago and could be related to me cleaning my w2k installation by removing remainders of old program installations and other 'unused' files.

anybody had a similar problem? Or any idea what the culprit might be?