what's wrong with a draw?

[djhbrown]

when you can't side a piece of paper between two people, shouldn't their performances be adjudged equal?

what's this obsession with championship?

why is second-rate not good enough?

what's the name of the second-highest mountain in Japan?

Alef gets her knickers in a twist because 7.5 is clearly too much, and, presumably, 6.5 is not enough.

Maybe 7, plus or minus 2, is a fair komi.

[daal]

I totally agree. This half point business of insisting that one player wins seems pretty arbitrary. I'm all for making komi an integer. Half point wins are no where near as prevalent as draws are in chess. What's the harm in calling a very very close game a draw? If a decision is needed, more games should be played.

[djhbrown]

What's the harm in calling a very very close game a draw?

You put your finger precisely on the key point: harm.

By definition, there's no harm in a draw, because there is no winner and no loser. No-one gets hurt.

And that's no fun at all, because fun, it seems, is beating the bejesus out of your opponent.

Who would watch Rocky IV if there were no victor and no vanquished?

When i was at school, we were taught History.

History, it turned out, was all about who was King when and who was King after that and that Wellington had beaten Napoleon.

There was no mention of Dzandar.

But when i went, aged 14, on my own to France, all the French kids, on being introduced to me, said "Dzandar! Dzandar!". I had no idea what they were talking about so excitedly.

We had been taught how great Wellington beat nasty Nap - there was no mention of the Prussian army that saved Wellie's bacon, there was no mention of the brothers who financed both Wellie and Nap with high-interest loans.

In 1985, i think it was, some namby-pamby lefties did a surprising thing, something that had never been done before; something unthinkable: they led a bunch of schoolkids across the Great Divide to meet their counterparts on the other side of the Great Wall down the middle (well, not exactly the middle, it was a fair bit off to one side) of God's Own Country.

Afterwards, one of them was interviewed on TV.

"It was very interesting!" he said, "...they're just like us!!"

This is your pilot speaking; we will shortly be arriving at Belfast airport. Please put on your seatbelts and turn your watches back 400 years.

I bet, even when i tell you her name, most of you will have to Google it.

Jeanne d'Arc.

https://vimeo.com/85914510

[jeromie]

I think it's more exciting when a game of go can end in a draw. Sometimes that's the proper end of a hard-fought, close match.

[pookpooi]

Does allowing a draw = more fair?

[Tryss]

I think it's more exciting when a game of go can end in a draw. Sometimes that's the proper end of a hard-fought, close match.

Unless draw become the norm.

And by the way, it's perfectly possible that there is no fair komi (even if you allow draw).

[djhbrown]

Unless draw become the norm.

if there were any justice in the fog of Go war, the normal outcome within a normal distribution would be a draw. the excitement is that maybe you can win against the odds.

real wars are won, not by superior wisdom, but by bigger guns.

same is true for Go wars.

[Mike Novack]

.......real wars are won, not by superior wisdom, but by bigger guns......

Really? I would think that knowing how to effectively use those guns, when and where, matters. When we say war favors the side with the bigger battalions we mean "assuming roughly equal competence". There are plenty of examples.

And judgements like THIS << there was no mention of the brothers who financed both Wellie and Nap with high-interest loans >> Careless thinking. HIGH INTEREST? If forced to lend to both sides bound to lose both half the principle and half the interest so that's not how they made out like bandits. The big money was made on these loans by a superior "intelligence system" able to report back on the outcome of the battle well before the rest of "the market" knew (they knew which loans to buy and which to sell)

[Pio2001]

In many cases, draw must be avoided. Especially in championships (national championship, world amateur championship...)

In these cases, replaying the game is not possible because of lack of time. Players have their journey back already planned.

[djhbrown]

If forced to lend to both sides bound to lose both half the principle and half the interest so that's not how they made out like bandits.

i see why you could imagine that a man with an army could force a man with money to lend him some, but actually, the cause-effect dynamics was the other way round: the men with the money induced the men with armies to fight, by lending them a little a time, to make their other guy anxious/greedy as the case may be, escalating the whole affair until it came to a head at Waterloo. The bond coup Jacob pulled off was the icing on his cake, a trifling decoration on top of the meaty loan interest.

f you were around during the 1960s, you may recall a similar escalation over time, an escalation which one puppet wouldn't dance to his strings, even daring to issue redbacks, so they eased him out of the way in Dallas, just as they had the greenback guy in New York 200 years prior.

may i refer you to my treatise on the subject of interest which should explain how you can make a bet both ways and come out miles ahead whoever wins; it doesn't cite the particular example of Jacob's brother who covertly financed Nap so that (so we are told, yeah, right) Nap didn't know it was he who was his sugar-daddy. If i had logged all the URLs i could give you chapter and verse, but it was a while back and i forget, but it's easy enough to Google "who financed Napoleon?"