Hi everybody,

So I'm pretty new to Go (most computer Go games rank me at anywhere from 18 to 15 kyu, for whatever that's worth) but I really enjoy playing and have been getting more and more interested in it. In truth, I've actually been half-playing it for a few years (after reading the super-popular Hikaru No Go manga), though I've only started playing seriously just recently. My striving to better understand the game has made me realize that I'm a bit confused about scoring methods.

I get how scoring works I think, but I've come to realize that there are a couple different methods. The "forumula" I've been taught is basically surrounded territory (i.e. not including your stones) + prisoners + opponent's dead stones. As I've come to understand it, this is referred to as the Territory method of scoring.

To me, this method seems the most natural, especially since it's the method used in the previously mentioned Hikaru No Go manga (and anime) that introduced me to the game. Recently though I've learned about the other scoring method, apparently called "Area scoring." As I understand it, scoring in this method is simply surrounded territory + the number of stones you have on the board. By what I've read, this latter method is the one pretty much everybody outside of Japan and Korea uses, including the AGA.

So here's basically what I'm asking - what method of scoring should I use? While I know that neither one is necessarily right or wrong (and, from what I've read, both methods are supposed to come out with the same point difference 9 out of 10 times), I'm more wondering which method it's suggested that I use as an American. While I do prefer the territory method out of habit, this isn't a deeply ingrained habit so I'd almost rather break it then cause possible confusion for both myself and anyone I might teach the game to. So should I, as an American, go with the AGA standard or should I just go with what I'm used to (the "Japanese method," as some have referred to it)?

Thanks for reading my ramblings!

Ben

PS: Also, I've heard that a lot of the popular Go servers (being either Japanese or Korean based) use territory scoring.

Territory scoring is often referred to as Japanese scoring, and area scoring as Chinese

Scoring under AGA rules are the same as Chinese scoring, but are contrived such that you can still use the more popular Japanese scoring method and still have the same result. (this is done via pass stones and making sure that both players play the same number of moves)

Thanks for the response!

So I should probably start using Chinese scoring in concordance with the AGA rules?

Use whichever you're more comfortable with. They almost always give the same result, but sekis are counted slightly differently and so there's cases where, say, black wins under Japanese rules but white wins under Chinese rules (I think.)

AGA rules allow you to use either methods of counting -- with identical scores

But I doubt you'll find many people who will play with you using AGA rules except in an AGA tournament

If you're playing online mostly, then I wouldn't worry about it, because the computer will score it for you (after marking your dead stones). Most people won't even notice if their opponent has chosen a different ruleset online.

If "natural" is "you have known first". From an objective view, it depends on how one defines "natural". E.g., if natural is defined as "the same nature during a) playing the game and b) scoring the game", then Area Scoring is natural while Territory Scoring (as you know it) is unnatural: For Area Scoring, there is only one move-sequence and the moves can remain executed; for Territory Scoring, there is only one move-sequence while playing the game but there can be arbitrarily many move-sequences while scoring the game and moves during playing the game remain executed while moves during the scoring have to be undone. I am having difficulty finding some definition of natural so that Territory Scoring would be natural but Area Scoring not; it is easier to find other definitions so that both are natural.



It depends on using where and for which purposes, on opponents and playing venues, tournaments or not. If you have some specific criterions, then answering is easier. E.g., if simplicity of the rules is a criterion, then Area Scoring is the choice, as you can find out:

http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/rules.html



It depends on what you mean by "right" and "wrong". Yes if you mean "justified by historical creation". If you mean "not having severe mistakes in the rules", consider those of a typical example ruleset for Territory Scoring:

http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/wagcflaw.html

Translation: "Area scoring is better."

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Patience, grasshopper.

For a beginner it shouldn't really matter which scoring is used. An average player probably never comes across a situation where the outcome of the game would depend on it.

BTW, as a non-native English speaker the use of terms "area" and "territory" in this context has always confused me, since they are usually translated to my native language with the same word ("alue" in Finnish)

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For a beginner it matters very much because of the extremely different difficulties of rules understanding.



Area and territory are terms. If Finnish does not have two terms, then translate them as "area" and "territory" (or something similar suitable for Finnish pronunciation)!

The finer points and the weaknesses of some rule sets don't concern a beginner, and I'd say they don't concern most players in general. When I started out, I was mostly confused by the existence of two "archetypes" of rules and I felt that area (Chinese) counting was more intuitive and I still believe it is easier to teach to someone (because they can make unnecessary safety moves without affecting the score), but most people online were using territory (Japanese) scoring, which is also what most books use, so I learned that. Once I had grasped it, it felt more "elegant" to me, but it's less straight forward.

Those different scoring methods, extended further by various organizations making modifications, are one of the chief reasons why Go isn't more popular "in the west", in my opinion. Chess doesn't suffer from the same issue. This is also why I always grin at "Go is easy to learn". No, it's not, it's confusing as heck.

Although this is already very much OT: "area" and "territory" are everyday words in the English language (which I use a lot in different contexts). I can not help that whenever I encounter those words they are more or less "automatically" translated to something - and in this case the same Finnish word. I have no problem distinguishing "japanese scoring" from "chinese scoring", since japanese and chinese translate to entirely different words even in Finnish, but when I encounter the terms "area scoring" and "territory scoring" I have to think really hard to remember which means which. Perhaps it's just me, I don't know how other Finns deal with it.

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The evidence suggests otherwise.

The evidence is that still nobody could show me any beginner with a reasonable understanding of territory scoring rules. Therefore the evidence does not suggest otherwise. In particular, beginners tend to overlook simple facts such that filling liberties for final removals is a mistake. Almost all beginners are having great difficulties with reading more than one move deep or with the idea of playing inside an eye; this is the contrary to having an ability to distinguish life from death. Beginners reading the wrong introductions don't even know that sekis exist. Etc.

Beginners fail with much more fundamental aspects of territory scoring rules than the finer points or the weaknesses.

I'm guessing the original poster has already given up on the debate in this thread, but I'll go ahead and share my experience.

I first found out about go when someone handed me a copy of Go For Beginners . I found a friend who had also learned the rules somewhere, and the two of us just played each other, figuring out stuff by consulting the book and trial and error. Of course Go For Beginners teaches Japanese scoring.

For us in the beginning, the question of dispute resolution was quite confusing, and unfortunately it isn't explained at all (as I remember) in Iwamoto's book. After a few games we realized that someone could stubbornly force you to capture dead stones by not "agreeing" as a way of forcing you to fill in your own territory. Eventually we just agreed not to do this, it seemed somehow "wrong". I didn't learn the correct response (play it out, then roll back the moves) until much later. And for a beginner remembering how a position looked after fighting something out isn't necessarily practical.

The AGA solution seems simple and elegant to me: if your opponent forces you to capture stones, the must give you one prisoner for each time they pass. I wish I had known this rule when I was first learning, it would have caused less confusion for me. Maybe if I had a stronger player to explain how it works, it wouldn't have mattered, but I didn't.

Hmm, ok thanks. I was under the uneducated impression that most people in the US probably used AGA rules in general, though I guess it makes sense that they might not since Go isn't nearly as popular over here as it is in Japan, Korea, and China.



Yeah, by "natural" I meant "natural to me." Japanese scoring seems more natural to me since that is how I first learned and since every book I have on the subject has been Japanese or Korean. It's not that Area scoring seems abnormal to me (I don't mean to offend), it's just that it is different from how I have ever played so therefore less normal, if that makes sense



I kind of like the fact that in Japanese scoring it makes me think more when doing "safety moves" in my own territory. While I think these could also make me and other beginners be too hesitant to place stones in their own territory, I think that this might help break a habit of over-focusing on one area? Again though, this is just my uneducated opinion.



I honestly don't consider territory scoring all that difficult - but perhaps I am doing it wrong and oversimplifying it? Are there several steps to it that I'm not aware of? I'll have to read up on this...



You've definitely got some interesting points...how often do these types of difficulties come up in Japanese and Korean games that (as far as I know) don't have the pass stone rule?

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Anyways, thanks for all of the answers! Nice to see that this is a very active community

For now I think I will stick with Japanese/territory scoring since that's what I know, that's what my books teach, and because that's what it seems like most online people play with. I'll probably try out Chinese/area scoring with a few games though, and might switch over.

Thanks again!

This should be true regardless of what rule-set you use. In area scoring, you get points for playing in the worthless empty points between territories; in territory scoring, you lose points for playing inside your own territory. Same difference. However, if you think territory rules make it easier for you to understand this aspect of the game, all the more reason to play with territory rules.

Pedantic point: beginners often play unnecessary moves inside their own territory in the middle of the game. This sort of move forfeits the 5-10 points that one could have gotten from playing in a valuable part of the board. This forfeit is far more important than the lost point of territory (under territory scoring) or the forfeited dame point (under area scoring). But humans are loss averse, so I suspect it's more obvious to beginners that they've made a mistake when you tell them they destroyed a point of their own territory than when you tell them they failed to make five additional points of territory.

No, you're doing it right. Don't worry about it.

They come up very, very rarely - basically only when you're playing a game with a very ignorant, very stubborn sore loser. The final solution, regardless of what rule-set you're using, is to call in a tournament official/server administrator. And, as Hobbes was fond of saying, if you aren't playing in a tournament or on a server, clubs are trumps.

So these difficulties with the rules are all hypothetical. However, a certain type of person is more upset by hypothetical difficulties than by real difficulties.

Thanks for the nice, thoughtful response! I think I'm definitely sticking with territory scoring, but I do plan on learning area scoring (which I pretty much get right now, I think).

Territory scoring and area scoring are very similar there: Under area scoring, you first want to play the endgame before making superfluous safety moves. The difference occurs after the endgame and if the score is 0 or 0.5: Then a safety move can lose the game under territory scoring but not under area scoring.



Have a rough reading (as a beginner, you are already too interested in rules anyway:) ) of
http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/j_verbal_status.pdf
http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/j1989c.html
Then tell me if you have been aware of the major territory scoring aspects. Warning: This is the reality of Japanese / Korean style rules. It could all be simpler as in
http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/sj.html
but the Japanese and Koreans hate rules simplicity.



The major rules mistakes become relevant in each game, see
the section "Dead Stones in Territory Do Not Exist" in
http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/j1989c.html

Under the pretence that the actually valid, official rules did not have any mistakes, occurrence of difficulties becomes a matter of frequency of difficult life and death status questions, where difficult depends on playing strength and the players' ability to notice the difficulty. IOW, beginners can have the greatest frequency but also they make many judgement mistakes about life and death so overlook quite some of the difficulties.



Do they? Usually they hide most or all of the difficulties and fail to explain at least how to create a two-eye-formation.

Thanks for the response!

Hmm, those rules are quite long
Still though, it doesn't seem like deciding life and death is that difficult, though I understand that it's probably much more difficult in pro (and even high amateur) games and that there needs to be a standardized way to decide these things for tournament purposes - right?

As for the couple of Go books I have, they do use territory scoring and they do explain how to create two-eye formations. I can't say that what I've learned is the same as the rules you posted above, but the books are Korean - perhaps this is a difference, though I've been told that both use the same scoring method. Are the life and death rules different then?

A question - are you trying to say that I should switch to area scoring?

Anyways, I'm not trying to focus on the rules too much...I simply want to know that I'm scoring correctly. Right now I'm playing most of my games in person, so I want to make sure that I can at least score so that a teaching game isn't filled with a lot of "um...I 'm not sure"'s during scoring...

PS: By the way, the books I've been reading are the first three from Jeong Soo-hyun and Janice Kim's Learn to Play Go series.