So what would be your major assumption?

I can think of no reasonable reason for him to start a dispute. If you cannot think of one, or more relevantly, if you did not have one in mind at that time, then your behavior implied that your opponent was not reasonable, and therefore an insult.

Anyway, the case was settled long ago. The referee, appeals committee and rules committee all found that your behavior was unacceptable. If you wish to continue to believe that it was, that is your prerogative. The go community has reached a verdict, and that is what stands.

For what it's worth:

Cho Chikun re-captured a ko stone without first playing a threat in a recent game in the Chinese City League against Baek Hongsuk. Baek saw Cho play this illegal move and pointed it out. This resulted in a penalty for Cho and he (Cho) resigned.

Cho Chikun has made the same mistake before in a Meijin title challenger match. Cho Chikun even retook a ko after asking the timekeeper if it was his turn to retake it. The timekeeper said yes, which was wrong, and Cho illegally retook the ko. The game was recorded as a draw after a rules dispute. Now, retaking the ko before making a threat results in a loss no matter what anyone says.

Cho Hunhyun has lost a game because he played a move inside a ponnuki shape that was not a ko.

In many of these cases, the player who lost was winning by a margin that is considered impossible to overcome by the pros. In most of these cases, the opponent pointed out the illegal move and started the dispute.

Loss due to strange arcane aspects of the rules is a loss as well. If a player believes that there is a legal way to win, than doesn't the player have the right to pursue that route?

I am so confused by this discussion of morality. Are we saying that the pros are morally bankrupt? Since money is often at stake in pro matches, trying to win by rule dispute when one was definitely going to lose otherwise must be stealing money, right?

The fact that Jasiek lost the rule dispute doesn't really matter to me. Every player should have the right to make the case that he won if he believes that he did according to the rules. It is up to the governing body to make the decisions it wants to make and the players should accept the result. However, to say that lodging the dispute or claiming a win by dispute is immoral? That sounds crazy.

There are limits to conscience inquiries (here: of me) and limits to provoking speculations (here: mine) about others' (here: my opponent's) intentions. This forum is not a witch trial and you are not inquisitors.



The case, but not the rules interpretation. The Ing 1991 Rules are still not fully understood.



None of them judged about my behaviour. They judged about rules application.



The go community is as split in its opinions as it has always been.

In a tournament, the player's job is to win, plain and simple. If the opponent does not know the rules the tournament is played with and thus makes an erroneous move, he is to suffer the consequences.
Now, if the rules are arcane and hard to understand, that is a strong argument for people - when donning the Tournament Organizer Hat, not a Player Hat - to consider different rules. Clear tournament rules and a good tournament structure* are in everyone's best interest. But when in a tournament, it is the players' and the judges' job to know the rules and interpret them correctly. Little else to it.

*Many quite popular tournament structures are bad - see the Badminton scandal at the Olympics for a disastrous case that was handled horribly - the tournament structure made losing a match the correct play to win the tournament and the players were penalized for this. Ridiculous.

You really think so? Tell me, which rules did they quote or refer to, to support their decision?

lemmata:
unless i am mistaken, EGF uses what i perceive as a more reasonable policy towards illegal moves - they are undone and the violator plays another move instead of losing by default. this caused the dispute in the Šilt-Dinerstein match at 2011 EGC.

as for pursuing any legal way to win, there come terms like sportsmanship or honour into play and i don't really know how to explain what they are and why i value them (even at expense of victory). in my opinion rules are here to ensure good games for everyone, not that a good game is any played according to the rules. i leave definition of a 'good game' opened.

i don't deny Robert his right to initiate the dispute. and at the same time i wholeheartedly agree with the final decision in Csaba's favour. in fact, if Robert's intention was presented as to point out the bad design of the rules that would allow him to win despite loss on the board, instead of trying to win otherwise lost game due to bad design of the rules, it would look entirely different to me

_________________
Spilling gasoline feels good.

I might be wrong, but probably not.

Robert is right. You are wrong. I was in the rules commission, when it handled the case. We settled the case of the result of the game and did not judge behaviour of any player.

So which rules did you quote?

Sportsmanship and honour are vague, nebulous things. As a hilarious example, in Warhammer tournaments you are scored on sportsmanship and are typically docked in points by the opponent due to bringing a "hard" list - ie. one that aims to win usually by any means necessary. The goal of tournament rules is to, first and foremost, be as clear and as unambiguous as possible. In my experience good games tend to happen when:

1. The game is designed to withstand cutthroat competition. Go passes this test handily.
2. The rules are clear and precise, so as to minimize ambiguity. Go could probably stand improvement here.

With the above, there is little need for nebulous judgment - you play, and that is it, case closed.

It is not necessary that I confirm each of my statements a second time.



I have not claimed that they did support their decision well with rules citations. I have said: "They judged about rules application." I would have wished that their judgement about rules application would have relied well on rules references, so that later rules application would have been made much easier.

IIRC, the appeals committee judgement said (roughly): "The game is in a Game Stop. Please continue the game!" (Game Stop is a term in the Ing 1991 Rules, and the appeals committee had read the rules booklet [borrowed from me, of course:) ] when making their decision.)

A well supported decision would also have explained why the third and fourth successive passes were considered ignored (and why such a consideration would have been appropriate according to the court) or why the succession of four passes created a Game Stop. The latter cannot be derived from the rules booklet; that would be the Game End. Therefore, the former explanation seems more reasonable in retrospect (and motivated by Bill Spight's thinking) from what might have been the appeals committee's thinking.

As has been said many times before, the rules commission did not provide explanation.

@Herman: In the video, the referee that first judged the case quoted the rules as saying something along the lines of:



He said that since it doesn't mention anything about the number of sequential passes, play should resume and continue until both players agree that all remaining stones are dead.



I completely agree with this, but for some people a good game is a very competitive one, and I can't see why so many here can't seem to see that. You're not being sportsmanlike if you try and force others to adhere to your way of playing, you're just coming up with your own rules.

And to everyone who's saying that Robert should have explained things to his opponent when it became aparrant he didn't understand the rules: Why are you just criticizing one player? When one player is continuing to remove dead stones while the other passes, it must be pretty obvious to both players that they do not share the same understanding of the rules.

Not yet. The rules allow more than one way of removing stones, e.g., one player can remove, the other passes, when the one player has taken off the last interesting stone(s), then the other can start to play and remove. It became obvious (to me) only due to the executed third successive pass.

Fair enough, but I expect it was obvious to your opponent.

My opponent seemed surprised when I hinted at my rules view after the 4th pass.

For a friendly game at the local club, I would think that it is bad form to win by such disputes. However, the EGF is a more serious organization that serves a greater population.

Don't you think that it is extremely unfair to burden tournament players with the task of determining which legal lines of winning play are moral (and in the spirit of good sportsmanship) and which ones are contemptuous? Are some moves moral depending on the level of the participants involved? How do we decide that? Do you want to ask players to make such decisions on top of reading out variations? This is the burden that we will be imposing on players if we tell them that the morality of their legal moves will now be judged by the community at large.

Do you feel that this kind of unfathomable burden is raised by the example that is being talked about in this thread?

If you're a good sport, you never need to have second thoughts, because you wouldn't consider something dishonest in the first place.

It's a good thing most tournament venues prevent smoking already, otherwise our poor players might have the difficulty of deciding whether it's good sportsmanship to blow smoke in their opponents' faces (an old chess book actually recommended this as a way of gaining an advantage).

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Occupy Babel!

um, politeness is also a criterion in the evaluation function i judge my moves with. and even if you pose it as something new and undesirable, politeness of others' play influences my view of them. i can only guess i am not the only one thinking so.

just as i don't base my real life decisions on what is legal, but more on what i perceive right, i don't act at tournaments strictly according to the borders of the rules, but let myself be lead by a common sense. i realize that if everyone followed the same principle, not everyone would do what i would, and i can't persecute them for that, but i can dislike them if our values are too divergent

_________________
Spilling gasoline feels good.

I might be wrong, but probably not.