See that there was something about AGA members self pairing to play rated games online back in 2013 but didn't really see any more. The USCF has (or acknowledges) online tournaments at both ICC and Chess.com and was wondering where the AGA is. Am mostly interested in tournament play but I guess self pairing is better then nothing (though come to think of it would be pretty nice to be able to play rated matches with friends). Also in the article referred to above only KGS was mentioned (not really a fan) are there other servers where we can play AGA rated tournaments or self pair? Any info or links appreciated. =)

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

I think that when rated AGA tournaments on line were being considered one of the major concerns was how to prevent players' using joseki books, life and death programs, and pro game databases, or even having someone much stronger play sureptitiously in place of a player. Thirty to forty years ago the US Championship was determined by two sub-tournaments, East Championship and West Championship, played face to face, and then the winners of these would play a game by telephone to decide who was the US Championship. The two winners of the West and East who played off by telephone would have referees making sure things were on the up and up. Nowadays it could probably be done with Skype or something like it so that the players would be on camera.

Understand the concern. The USCF handles it by using separate ratings for online play (they currently have two ratings for online play "blitz" and "rapid") and apparently strong anti-cheating measures in place (also putting ones actual federation/association membership in jeopardy (as apposed to some online account) seems like a bit of a deterrent. Don't know how much if any of this would be feasible for the AGA or if they are even interested anymore. They are interested in increasing membership (obviously) and offering online rated play would be a pretty straight forward way to increase interest.

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

Hi! I'm Andrew Jackson, VP of Operations for the AGA, and ineffective volunteer.

here's the plan:

- This is something the AGA would like to support.
- Like the USCF, we want to have separate ratings for online and in-person play. It'll be useful to see how the ranks converge/diverge.
- Further, the 'online-ratings' are to be implemented by being a protocol that any go server can implement: In short, if two AGA members play each other on a server implementing the online-rating protocol, the server will notify us of the result, and we will update their online rating accordingly.
- A few go servers have already verbally committed to implementing the protocol.

Here's where we are:
- The shell of the online-ratings server that the AGA will maintain is under development here: http://github.com/usgo/online-ratings
- The development is entirely done by volunteers -- as such, it's moved in fits and starts as volunteers have had time.
- It doesn't look like it'll be done in time for Congress this year, but hopefully after congress I'll have a bit more time.
- Issues of cheating, joseki books, whatever -- we'll cross those bridges when we get there. Personally, i think worrying about bad actors before we have something for good actors is premature.

Hope this helps & happy to answer any questions you might have. If you'd like to volunteer, the github page has links to a design overview & development plan

Heyo, thanks Andrew, wonderful news this! Am a big fan btw, you and the SGC confrère are doing some awesome things to promote the game. Also cheers for pointing out possibility of volunteering.

ps Thanks for doing a review of your game with Frank, and good luck with stream of MRT and Congress!

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

Thanks! I know things aren't moving as quickly as i'd like...you can have a look at the commit history and see how fast (or not) we've been going. Huge shout out to Tim Henigan who's been one of the few people to step up and write code. Lots of people have said they'd like to help but turning that into actual pull requests has been a little tough...

Happily, I'll be taking July off from SGC classes, which should free up a bit of my go-time to work on this again! Hopefully i can get a bunch done.

Happily? I know some YouTubers who will be most disappointed with your attitude.

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- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

they'll have plenty to watch, and i have a backlog of videos to edit anyway

That caught my attention. When I was an admin at KGS, I took a position which with my fellow admins disagreed. I felt that, if done consistently in online games, using joskei books, life and death software, advice from other players, or other help was not necessarily cheating.

I started a discussion on this, at http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=11935

By the way, I am wondering how the AGA online ratings will handle players with multiple accounts. Has this been decided yet, or is it one of the bridges you expect to cross in the future?

Yep, i'm definitely familiar with that conversation! FWIW, i think "playing tournament games in person" is a slightly different skill than "playing games online". There's a lot of overlap, to be sure, but they are different activities. While your rating at one might inform and be highly predictive of your rating on the other, they're not necessarily the same human activity. See also OGS' enlightened approach to rating realtime & correspondence games as different things.

Re: multiple accounts -- you may have as many accounts as you want on as many servers as you want, but they'll all map back to the same AGA ID#. No big deal.