As Robert pointed out, dictionaries can be outdated, but how do you think people who write dictionaries find out what the words mean?

Dictionaries are in fact there to clarify the meanings of words. I quoted a dictionary as an authority after first thinking about how I had heard and seen the German word used, and second after consulting native speakers to corroborate my opinion. Again, Robert is right in implying that it is possible for words to acquire new connotations and for these connotations to not be immediately generally accepted. Whether this is the case with Sportlichkeit is difficult to judge, because except for Robert himself, no one here has corroborated his opinion.

For me, dictionaries are an important source of information. I quoted the dictionary in order to acquire a basis for discussion, because it appeared from Robert's comment, that there was a German equivalent of Sportsmanship, that he had misunderstood the English word. Whether this is the case still remains unclear. While asserting his personal competence in matters of semantics over that of a dictionary may be in this case correct, it is nonetheless irrelevant to the meaning of the English word "Sportsmanship," and is a type of comment that makes me question whether understanding his arguments is worth the trouble.

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Patience, grasshopper.

I think of it kind of the situation like this:

"Person A" ----------- "Common Language" ----------- "Person B"

It's often easiest if both people meet in the middle, using a standard form of common language:
-----------> "Person A" "Common Language" "Person B" <-----------

But sometimes, for whatever reason, a person will not meet you in the middle. In that case, if you are "Person A", you need to step past common language and speak in a way that "Person B" will understand. This is more work for "Person A":
"Common Language" ---------------------->"Person A","Person B"

But with multiple people, the situation has more dimensions:


Now, the only way to really meet so that everybody can understand well is in the center, at the point of "common language".

But let's say that everybody except "Person B" is doing that:


Persons A, C, and D are all at some common place of understanding, and Person B is all by himself/herself using some other language.

Of course, it's easiest if Person B just comes and joins everybody:


This is the least work. But if I am Person A, and I want to understand what Person B is trying to say, for a little while, I can diverge from "Common Language", and go see what he's trying to express:


The only reason I would do this is if I wanted to understand Person B. But it's still an option I have if I want to understand his thoughts.

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be immersed

Yes, but what if you try repeatedly and Person B chooses to be obtuse? What diagram do you draw then? A custard pie, a matchstick man and an arrow come immediately to my unartistic brain.

Hehe, yes. I think everyone has some threshold where they say, "It is not worth my effort to try with this person anymore".

I guess that threshold probably depends on how highly you value what they have to say.

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be immersed

@daal Perhaps I am too quick to snark at dictionaries. Surely they're a bit better than just insisting you know everything.

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Occupy Babel!

And once more: I don't know how you can raise an objection to a situation in which everybody followed the binding rules.

If you don't like the rules, fine, its a valid personal opinion. Some will agree with, others will not. Get together and vote for changing the rules, see what happens. I don't really care. My point is that you cannot blame the referee for following the rules and using his discresion within the bounds defined by the rules.


Now lets go back to the 'sportsmanship' debate. The above topic is so obvious as to be absolutely trivial, and thus uninteresting. If you insist on discussing it, you'll have to do it with others, not with me.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

From the information available in English so far, I am not sure yet whether the referee acted according to the rules.

If the rules did suggest what the referee decided, then indeed I vote for much better tournament rules especially in tournaments in that I might also play some time. Since such tournament rules might be influenced by tournament rules in other tournaments (like Asian Games), I suggest also much better tournament rules in them.

Before playing in a tournament subject to referee decisions similar to the one disputed, I would like to know and understand the limits so that I could at least in principle have a chance to abide by the rules' intention before any dispute is possibly started and to create only such disputes that were intended instead of having to test each and every ambiguous case for the sake of learning what the rules intention might be.

Every so often in whatever sport or game somebody comes up with an idea so far outside the box that the rules can't cope with it. In these situations the referees have to decide:

a) Let the trick work this time (wasn't forbidden by the rules). The rules committee will deal with it by next time so will be only a one time oddity. If a "record" event the rules committee may decide to disallow the oddity in terms of "best ever" record (see my example).

b) Because of the near certainty of how the rules committee will rule, disallow now too.

My example comes from decades ago and the auto event know as a "ton miles per gallon" rally. Follow the course (must complete course) but winner judged by mileage adjusted for the weight of the vehicle. Imagine the shock of the officials at one of these events when a cement mixer showed up insisting on being entered as a "two seat sports mixer". Terrible mileage but with a multiplier of 26 tons going to achieve a score ~130 and as a construction vehicle going to manage to negotiate the dirt road route. Well no rule excluded heavy construction vehicles from this sports car event (but winners often 2 ton sedans like a Benz) so they decided to let it in and were even more surpirsed when the second cement mixer showed up.

Needless to say the rules were changed for next time and the unusually high socres of these vehicles not considered for the "all time best" (even getting to 100 a very good score)

What we see here is an example of that. The rules didn't think to exclude the otherwise legal (but stupid) play of filling a space inside one's own territory since that lowers the score. BUT it allows lots of plays since can fill all but two eyes in each group. So if your opponent doesn't have much time left on her clock .......

PS -- Perhaps this should be taken over into the "rules" area? With a topic of "meta-rules"? That's what we are really talking about here, a "meta-rule" deciding how the rules of the game are to be interpreted when confronted with a "trick" that is certain to be disallowed for the future. Are we to allow it this one time or not?

i am sorry but your example sucks!
sudden death has been played by chess players and go players many many years.
currently rule has many gray areas that will cause problems.
it needs to change.

now i am curious..how does chess handle sudden death?
do they have any rule of ref stoping the game because of similar reason as this??

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"The more we think we know about
The greater the unknown"
Words by neil peart, music by geddy lee and alex lifeson

I agree entirely with the thrust of what you say, but I think this bit is slightly ambiguous in that you appear to be assuming Japanese type rules.

Under Japanese rules, there is at least a cost-benefit angle to the heinous trick - as you say, you lose a point if you play inside your own territory, so if your opponent is fast enough you can end up losing on points. Also, a little bit of thought is required to make a play that is vexing enough to prevent the opponent just saying Pass.

Under Chinese or AGA rules, you can indifferently play inside your own or the opponent's territory virtually without thought and without penalty, and if a player says Pass he may also have to waste time handing over a stone, so the action of running down the clock is a tad more likely to succeed.

While I regard the intent of running down the clock as unfair play, it should also be noted that there is a fairly standard and apparently universally accepted tactic, when playing under byoyomi, of playing a digressionary forcing move just to stop the clock at 59 seconds and so gain a further minute for the main move. This loses a ko threat and so the cost-benefit equation may be said to cancel out there. There is the related tactic of playing a forcing move as a sealed move so as to get extra hours to think about the main move. The cost-benefit equation is certainly unlikely to be even close to zero here, and so many fans over the years have made it plain that they don't like this tactic, but it has not actually been banned. The very presence of these tactics possibly influences some players into thinking that running down the clock is acceptable, too.

Robert's example of the German lightning rules where all moves are considered legal until the dame stage, but after that time-wasting moves are considered unacceptable, is a good start in the right direction. But I'd guess that already someone has tried the tactic of time-wasting moves even before the last few endgame points have been played, and claimed these were legal.

What it all boils down to is not rules but moral fibre. Most have have it, some don't. Which leaves us in an imperfect world. But the world still goes round.

Sure. Most players do that in German lightning games. The stronger blitz players do it excessively. E.g., player #1 lost 1 game due to it, player #2 (that's me, equal NumberOfWins as #1) lost 0.5 wins by getting a jigo, player #3 lost 1 such game (against me). It is perfectly ok and just a sign of bad time management of the losers of such games earlier during their games. Waste 10 seconds less during the opening and you will survive the time-wasting extra moves (or their strategic implications like threatening revival of utterly dead groups) during the endgame.

Robert: You can't speak for all other players, but I imagine you have a sense of the general mood. Could to try to explain to us what goes through these players' minds.

It is clear that there is an intent in the German rules (drafted by you?) NOT to condone time-wasting moves as means of winning by running down the clock. Because of the admitted great difficulty of defining time-wasting moves, the current rules have had to be limited to defining them as after the point when only dame are left. Nevertheless, the intent is still there, loud and clear.

It seems to me that when you enter a tournament you agree to play by its rules. If the rules contain the clear intent to condemn time-wasting moves, you are surely agreeing to play according to that intent.

You already know that I consider people who think they are clever at ignoring intent and finding loopholes in rules to be stupid and boorish, but that is just my Weltanschauung. The truth is, I just don't understand these people. I can guess that it may just be that when one player does it the rest feel they have to, too, or be left at a disadvantage. But I'd still be disappointed if those with moral fibre were really as small a minority as you suggest, though I take solace in the assumption that those who object have already made their protest by not taking part. Perhaps you can explain.

It is not the general German rules but specifically the tournament rules for the German Lightning Championship.

The rules were drafted by a commission for writing all the tournament rulesets and then adopted by the general DGoB meeting.



The rules do not attempt to distinguish time-wasting and not time-wasting moves. Rather they distinguish pre-dame stage moves versus dame stage moves. The means of launching consideration of distinction is occurrence of passes.

Therefore, in German blitz, the intention is to allow ALL time-wasting moves in the pre-dame stage and to prohibit all time-wasting AFTER a pass has occurred during the dame stage.

The idea is that
- each player should play the endgame rather than passing too early or else accept his losses on the board when he prefers to attempt preventing a loss on time (IOW, a player should not escape the pursuit of competition for a better score by the bad excuse of being low on time),
- a player ahead by many points may choose the luxury of passing many times and still winning,
- especially in blitz until the dame stage, one cannot in general distinguish timesuji from tesuji from a combination of both, so no attempt is being made in that direction,
- time strategy is worth the same as board strategy.



Sure, but it does not invalidate principles of higher value like the game aim (winning by greater score). If that principle shall be violated by means of tournament rules, then such must be spelled out clearly and precisely.



See above, maybe you see clearer now.



By far the most players not participating in strict lightning tournaments abstain because of their insight about their own low ability to control strategy, tactics and psychology under short and finite time limits.

Robert, thanks, but I think this contains the nub of the difference between the two camps. There are people (the majority, I sense) who believe that winning the game is not a higher aim. It's a high card, but is trumped by the ace of sportsmanship (English definition), and that fact doesn't need spelling out.

Because the order of priority is unclear, good tournament rules (like the EGF General T Rules) specify which order is being applied.

This thread is like the Daoist-Confucian debates all over again!

I would not mind, if you can give a short summary of this debate. Thank you in advance

The Confucian ideal was that all aspects of society should be governed by strict rules, rites, and ritual. The rules of course are good enough to cover all cases and don't need to change. The Zhuangzi spends a lot of time quite skillfully making fun of this ideal.

I don't quite think that's accurate. In a nutshell, the Legalist position was that (strict, formulaic) rules would be enough to cover all cases, and that within those rules everyone should do their best to get whatever it was they wanted.

The Confucian position was that society worked because people aspire to follow a moral code that embodied a certain ideal of what a human being should be like (the moral code of a gentleman), and that therefore we need to educate people to share those aspirations. (That education may require a certain amount of ritual, but the rituals aren't an end in themselves, and the resulting concept of gentlemanly behavior is a flexible one shared by a community, rather than something chiseled in stone.)

It's hard to pin down Daoism precisely, because it changed a great deal over its history. Both Confucianism and Daoism, after all, think their adherents should follow "the way" (道, dao = way, path, road), and they both think that you follow the way by being virtuous. But while Confucians have in mind mainly the social virtues, Daoists prize spontaneity, creativity, and (eventually) aestheticism.

Anyway, if you want to use this framework, Palapiku, it's very clear that...

... Jasiek is a Legalist,
... Fairbairn is a Confucian,
... and the Daoists are off playing go somewhere.

Here is my take:

... Zhongguo Qiyuan is a Legalist (they knew people would try to win with timesuji in SD games, so they put in a rule to thwart it),
... Nihon Ki-in is a Confucianist (they expected players to adhere to certain moral standard),
... Hangul Kiwon is a Daoist (they chose to do nothing about fixing their rules, even after a series of disputes)