Tennis professionals have been known to rig exhibition matches. The spectators assume they are both trying to win, but actually they have decided the winner ahead of time and are really just putting on a show. I suppose if the badminton teams trusted each other, they could draw straws to decide who gets to lose, then put on an exhibition for the officials and spectators.

This comment is just a ramble about go etiquette.

I classify possibly unsporting behaviour in go under four headings.

[list=]
Those which are clearly against the rules, including unwritten rules.
Examples: punching the opponent; slyly moving stones around the board during
play; adding to one's prisoners from a hidden supply of stones of the
opponent's colour.

Those which are very bad manners. Examples: playing inside one's own
territory; playing out all the ko threats (in both cases, at the end of a
game with an absolute time limit).

Those which one would never do oneself, but which one could not object to if
done by others. Examples: highly speculative invasions late in the game when
behind; mirror go; and "invade all corners then live in the centre". I would
not expect success from mirror go or "invade everywhere", so there is no
temptation for me to try those tactics. On the other hand, if you don't know
how to respond to those tactics then there is a gap in your go knowledge which
it is your task to fill.

Those which one might do oneself. Examples: playing a ko threat to gain
time to think, if the timing rules encourage this; speculative invasions late
in the game when behind. I sometimes start two speculative invasions at the
same time, playing one stone in the opponent's Area A, then the next in Area B,
then back to A and so on. I feel a bit uneasy doing that. Even when it works,
there is no telling what would have happened if I had played out Area A before
trying Area B. (I am a weak player, so the outcome is basically random,
against a well matched opponent.)
[/list]

I can't really justify these classifications from first principles: it all
depends on how one was brought up to play the game. What do others think?

I have recently returned to playing in UK Tournaments after a long absence.
There are no valuable prizes at stake: even the winner will be out of pocket
after paying the tournament entry fee and his or her travel costs. In these
tournaments, the complexity of the game and time pressure are the real enemies,
not one's nominal opponent, who is a fellow enthusiast who has also spent time
and money to attend. When a sleeve or bomb tesuji occurs, both players do
their best to try to reconstruct the position as it should have been, without
crying foul. The only problem I have is getting used to Canadian-style
overtime, which had not been in use when I last played. Seeing that my clock
would soon run down, I used some of my thinking time to count out the 10 and 30
stones that would be needed for the first two 5-minute periods of overtime,
reasoning that it would take at least a minute to count out 30 stones and cover
my bowl to make sure no stones were accidentally taken from there instead.
After using the first 10, I switched to using the next 30 without resetting the
clock (which is probably illegal), and my opponent thought he had won when the
first period of five minutes ran out. In my next game, I was surprised when my
opponent simply stopped the clock while he counted out his first 10 stones.
What is the correct procedure? Would it be OK to bring a set of small
containers and count out 10 and 30 stones into them before the game began?

P.S. The "invade all corners then live in the centre" style was apparently used
with some success on KGS. The player in question managed to get to a high dan
rating and make himself highly unpopular. A stronger player eventually showed
how to defeat that tactic. I can't now find where I heard about this: it could
have been through Bat's video lectures or something similar. Has anyone here
got the reference?

P.P.S. A young Korean woman has appeared on Baduk TV while wearing a very short
skirt, totally ignoring the rules for polite Pair Go. Her name may be , which
could be romanised as I Seong-A. In the irresitible "Females versus Seniors"
series, she played a senior whose name I could not read, but his face and hair
reminded me of Simon Cowell. He looked very upset afterwards, but that was
because he lost by half a point (as best I could tell). I am also an old man,
and if faced with an opponent showing lots of flesh, I'd expect first to feel
cheered up and then to play no worse then I normally do, so I wonder why
someone thought the Pair Go dress code was needed.

Hit the "Submit" button too soon in the previous post. Grrr.

The female player's name may be 이선아 or I Seon-A.

Tournament rules must be set to minimise trouble strategies. For that reason and for the small board tournaments during the European Go Congress 2012, I set area scoring and replaced sudden death by 3 * 10s byoyomi. Players are creative though: some of those qualified for the KO stage refused to play. Therefore, next time I will use the explicit rule that qualified players are required to play. (Regardless, those players will get a penalty of prohibited entry during the next instance of such tournaments where I can ensure it.)