You are playing a fast game. Opponent kills your large group, and you are ready to resign, but you notice that opponent is short of time and there is some bad aji on the board. You decide to play on, making desparate attempts to make your opponent face difficult decisions hoping that you will win on time. Is this considered unethical?

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Not unethical in my book.

If the opponent has spent so much time that he can't finish the game, he should lose.

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FusekiLibrary, an opening library.
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Depends on my mood. In general I don't take blitz games too seriously, they're just for fun. So in a friendly game I might resign. But if I want to win this game for whatever reason - like being able to thrash-talk my friend - I push him through the clock .

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My name is Gijs, from Utrecht, NL.

When in doubt, play the most aggressive move

Frankly, I couldn't care less

If it was me, I'd resign, simply because I blundered and was behind badly enough to warrant it - scoring a win on time is not interesting to me. If it was my opponent, he can do what he likes.

There are a couple of things that tie into this. First of all, is your intention to

* run your opponent out of time.
* force him to make a mistake due to lack of time.

The first is not very ethical in my mind, while the second is perfectly fine.

Also, was the reason you didn't exploit the aji earlier on because

* you didn't think it would work.
* there were bigger spots on the board.

The first is quite rude on your opponent in that you are playing moves that you had no expectation of actually working.

if you play by the rules you agreed on then there is no ethics needed.
if you can not handle the heat then dont play blitz. too easy.

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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

This is interesting. To me, B and C (I lettered them for convenience) are intertwined. "Didn't think it would work" is dependent on the time to think things through. Even against an equal strength opponent, complicated but unfavourable positions get closer and closer to 50% favourable the less time there is to think about it, because pressured errors outweigh correct moves. Are you saying that hamete are always rude because given enough time your opponent will find the correct refutation?

I think if your opponent is short on time and the win is that important to you, evaluating awkward semi-exploitable aji as a "higher chance of success" because your opponent is short on time is not rude - it's playing with a recognition that the aji is very complicated, and without time to read out the complications the chances of success are good enough now even though they weren't earlier in the game.

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长考出臭棋.

There is nothing wrong with it.

Go is a game. There are rules. Your example says there is aji, so this is not, in your view, a meaningless invasion.

I run into this attitude alot. Folks who spend too much time in the opening, develop a lead, and then complain when they make a mistake under time pressure. "I would not have lost if I was not short on time"

Perhaps they would not have been ahead if they were not short on time.

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My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle

I don't think its unethical. It seems to me that playing within the rules defined is ethical (time allotted being part of the rules). But, there is an interesting aspect to the situation. If your primary goal is to win, then it may help you to achieve that. If your primary goal is to improve or get stronger, it probably won't help you achieve that. It's easy to associate winning with getting stronger, but that isn't always the case.

I'm inclined to agree with topazg, I usually don't care enough about the win to manipulate time when I feel I should have legitimately lost because of my poor play. Of course there are times when the immediate win has more value for me, the typical examples being tournaments or when my opponent was particularly annoying...

If there are still points on the board you can play them and make it as complex as you want to try and win on time.
When there are no points left you should pass, even if your opponent has only 1 sec left on his clock.
(no absurd invasions, useless ataries, or moves inside your own territory)

I think we even have explicit rules for blitz here in The Netherlands
They deal with this time issue, but I don't know the details.

I think in real life games people pretty much follow this.
Online some don't. I guess anonymity makes people less ethical.

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Laurens
Go school: freegame's Teaching School
Author of: The Next Move a book for 15-3kyu players.

I wouldn't consider it unethical, unless it was a friendly game. The clock is part of the game as well.

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a1h1 [1d]: You just need to curse the gods and defend.
Good Go = Shape.
Associação Portuguesa de Go

You say it's a fast game. The whole purpose of playing a fast game is to make time an important factor. What is unethical about using this to your advantage? And also, just because you try it doesn't mean that you'll necessarily succeed; your opponent might actually even enjoy the challenge of not cracking under time pressure.

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Patience, grasshopper.

Why would one want to have a win credited to them if they really knew they should have lost? That's the real question. If you're rating-obsessed, that might improve your rating a bit, but it's bogus, because your play didn't merit it. If it's a tournament, perhaps you might consider it a bit more fair, because of the pressure of tournament games. But in general, I feel one should have the humility to admit defeat.

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

Fixed your last sentence.

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a1h1 [1d]: You just need to curse the gods and defend.
Good Go = Shape.
Associação Portuguesa de Go

If you really think about our amatuer games, this statement is pretty absurd. Every moderatively competitive game is a game I should have lost at some point.

Treated objectively, with perfect knowledge, both sides of virtually all of our games reach several moments when, with proper play, the game is lost.

The game is not a game, unless the goal is to win. Yes we want to improve, perhaps more than winning an individual game, but without the pursuit of victory on the board, improvement cannot be achieved.

I say again, to win at go you have to do more than select the ingredients and follow a recipe - you have to actually eat the meal. And if you spend too much time squeezing josekis and dicing tesuji, the fellow who simply slapped together two slices of thickness smothered in aji may well have time to enjoy a feast while you rush, literally and figuratively, to choke the endgame down.

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My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle

The clock is part of the game. There's a tradeoff between playing quickly and playing well. If you are ahead on the clock but behind on the board, then presumably you could have played slower and better earlier so that you'd be closer on the board. Similarly, your opponent used a significant portion of his time allowance in order to get a better position on the board. To throw away one side of that tradeoff by refusing to make use of your time advantage seems silly.

A guy did exactly this to me at the last tournament I went to. It worked, I lost a corner and lost. I do not mind that he did it. I used too much time in the first half, as HKA said, and did not have time to read life and death. In that instance, I could even have played on additional stone to ensure life, but I was willing to bet the game on byoyomi reading. I used time poorly.

Similarly, if an opponent is not using his clock time at all, but puts himself in atari or makes some similarly boneheaded mistake, he has no excuse. He used time poorly and lost.

I don't know if I'd play specifically to try for a trick kill. Wins are more rewarding when players both play at their best the whole time. However, legitimate aji is legitimate aji. It seems to me that it is not unethical to want to finish any game, and if your opponent cannot read in time, so be it.

That said, in any form of friendly game, I wouldn't use time like this, so maybe I'm a hyppocrite. Maybe it's not unethical, but it's a little... cutthroat? Kind of like playing basketball and intentionally drawing a foul instead of taking a shot. Yes, they should not have committed a foul, but you chose specifically to provide them the opportunity to. So maybe not unethical, but hypercompetetive in a way that I try not to be too often.

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Someday I want to be strong enough to earn KGS[-].

It's not unethical, it's strategical. The clock is a part of the game.

...now if someone did do that to me, I will admit I'd feel a bit flustered. And that's why I stay away from time settings where this kind of situation could happen, so I haven't encountered anything like it in years.

In your example, it sounds like you traded your group for some bad aji and a time shortage. Time management is a big part of this game, after all...