if your opponent fills his own territory at the last second of each buyomi... that is within the rule but it isnt right.
I agree with the thinking behind this, but intriguingly this and similar sentiments can be said to be both correct and incorrect. It is important to know why.
The Japanese rules in particular come with a preamble that is actually part of the rules. But even without a specific preamble, all Oriental rules as published come with an introduction explaining the intent of the rules. The Japanese 1989 rules, for example (though other rulesets are similar), begin with an explanation that these rules "must be applied on the basis of the good sense and mutual trust of the players". This is in the very first paragraph of the body of the rules and so cannot be ignored. It is the very first
instruction (the first sentence simply says the rules were established by the Nihon Ki-in and Ki-in). You may fairly argue that "good sense" and "mutual trust" are not defined, but they are there, in first place, and so cannot be ignored.
Therefore, it can be said that silly actions such as filling in one's own territory without good cause go against the rules, i.e this preamble, because the preamble overrides everything else. Morality does not have to be called upon to support this. In that sense, the quote above could therefore be said to be technically incorrect. Of course, if you do call upon morality, in the very limited sense of applying commonly accepted norms of sportsmanship, then the statement is correct.
Now I may easily be wrong about this, because I am relying on memory, but the rules mavens usually ignore such preambles. Of course they have every right to produce their own rule sets that do not use a preamble, but if they are using, criticising or adapting rulesets that do have either such a preamble or a context that explains the spirit behind those specific rules, they are surely honour bound to acknowledge such (con)texts. To repeat, these (cont)texts can be fairly criticised, but they cannot be ignored.
Yet they often are, and not just by Jasiek.
If they are ignored by one player, as seems to be the case in the Mero-Jasiek game, that player, surely, is in effect inventing new rules on the fly. Which is of course unfair to the opponent. If the wording of a game-specific rule appears to be inconsistent with the preamble or context, all the player who spots the inconsistency can honourably do is to point it out. He cannot claim to win on the basis of this unilateral interpretation where the preamble or context gives sufficient grounds to suggest there was a higher intent. He cannot just ignore the preamble.
New readers may need to be reminded that Jasiek likes to repeat that he is a rules expert, but he does not read any of the Oriental languages and so he appears to be largely unfamiliar with the vast context created by Oriental writers who do write fairly extensively on rules themselves. I am presently able to see five
books on rules on a bookshelf opposite me, and I have others somewhere else, and of course the number of articles on rules in magazines is enormous (there have been a lot, in particular, in Chinese over the past few years). I hasten to add that this does not mean that Jasiek's research and his criticisms of specific items are in any way worthless, but I do think it means that he should refrain from making unilateral rules changes that ignore this very large context. In my interpretation of the event, this is precisely what he did in his game with Mero. Even in the west there had been plenty of material to indicate that Ing was not primarily concerned with the issue this game threw up. His context was ignored.
This is not intended to attempt to prove that Jasiek's interpretation of the particular rule minus the context was wrong. It is just that there appear to be some new faces in this thread who may find it useful to know that there is indeed a wider context.
