mitsun wrote:
1) Sente and gote are important in deiri counting. The evaluation of a move is not complete without a qualifier like "5 points in gote" or "3 points in sente". Also, reverse sente plays are considered to be worth twice their point swing value.
2) The end result is the same -- when the position is counted, the points are assigned to the side who can get them in sente.
That's certainly how I understand deiri counting - you have to mentally adjust it to miai counting to make it useful. (You don't mention ko, but again, I assume pros are perfectly good at adjusting deiri values to account for moves in ko.) I'm not saying there's anything
wrong with using deiri counting if you're really good at mental math, or you learned that way and it's not worth changing. But if miai counting is just an easier way to tally up the same arithmetic, why does JF see it as meaningful if the pros use deiri counting? And the answer seems to be that if professionals don't see any value in having a systematic theory of the endgame, there must not be anything valuable to be found there. (Sort of like the story of the economist who refused to pick a twenty off the sidewalk: "If it were really a twenty dollar bill, someone else would have taken it already!")