I almost never ask for undos but almost always grant them, this includes ranked online games and online tournaments. There were many cases where I wasn't sure whether the opponent's move was truly a missclick but have still clicked that OK button because I was able to convince myself that learning is more important than winning. I don't remember when was the last time someone asked for multiple undos so I can't really say how many undos is too many. I suppose it depends on the situation. Needless to say, I'd offer Shin an undo without a second thought and were that not allowed I would've "missclicked" as well to even out the playing field.

Of course I would've stopped the clock. Speaking in terms of current EGF tournaments, if we're allowed to stop the clock to go to the bathroom, I think stopping it when someone's clearly not feeling well is more than reasonable and at least within the spirit if not the letter of the rules.

I'd say there's a difference between using and abusing the clock. I've used timesujis while in byoyomi to count whether it's time for me to resign. I'm also not bothered if people use them to determine the best move since timesujis come with a cost of at least one ko threat and potentially one or more points.

Ultimately, what we need to decide is the type of game we want go to be. Do we want it to be closer to snooker where many players call fouls on themselves when the referees miss them and applaud each other's good shoots or closer to soccer where taking a dive is the norm and hockey where brawls are commonplace. My personal preference, of course, is the former. However, if the latter wins, I suppose I'll have to up my insult game and learn how to dodge chairs and boards.

I don't believe it to be the case that there is a single game here, so it doesn't make much sense to discuss "the game".
Go with Ing Rules with basic time limit of 2 hours is a different game than go with AGA Rules having basic time limit of 30 minutes. Both are different than a game having no time limit whatsoever. Even holding the time settings constant, variations in rulesets can produce different game variations as well (e.g. bent 4 in the corner implications).

All can be played, and many overlapping strategies may exist.

Some may prefer a game having no time limits, and that's fine. Likewise, given the sports analogy from earlier, some may prefer to play basketball without time limits - maybe first team to 100 points wins. Also fine. Just a different game, with potentially different strategy.

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be immersed

I'm regularly making this kind of trade off. I can see why someone would take offence at it but next in the spectrum are forcing moves and thank you moves.

It's also not uncommon for me to have a corner space which I think lives in ko but not 100% sure. If the opponent does a do-or-die there in byoyomi then it's up to me to live up to the bet I made, while the odds are in my favor. If I dread such a risk, I should add a stone, or devote some time to reading it out before entering byoyomi.

I think the original point was not so much whether these tactics are proper, since we can only speculate what the intentions of our opponent are, but whether it's a sign of honesty to reveal these intentions post fact or a form of bragging/cynicism.

Well, I'm not sure for others, but my belief that time is part of the game is based on the 'laws' of special relativity discovered by Einstein and also another mathematician whose name I don't quite recall (interestingly, Einstein ended up racing with a mathematical duo searching for general relativity too). When you are motionless in space, you move at the speed of causality in time. When you are motionless in time--like photons and other weightless particles are--you move at the speed of causality in space. So the next time someone says you don't exercise enough, you can tell them that you move at the speed of light through space! (from your perspective, of course )

All games of go that have ever been played were played within time limits. Before human-created clocks were introduced, making the other person tired might be abusing the biological clock. All games have a clock limit of the number of years the player with the least years left to live has, so if you postpone the game indefinitely and wait for your opponent to move on to the next life, that's abuse of the biological clock. Is it not? There is no difference between infinity per move and an empty board that is not actually a game. We assume in all rulesets any time limit, so long as it's finite.

Everything else however I would definitely agree with. People might delude themselves into thinking more restrictions on people's behavior, more petty laws on anything thing that might be slightly unfair, is the best thing to do in this type of thing, but in my view, we have pros for a reason.

Not only do I agree, but I think this is the defining point of the whole debate.

Most sporting activities (I include go and chess) have two broad aspects: contest and spectacle. For most non-pros who take an interest in the activity, one aspect or the other tends to dominate. It is a matter of personal preference, not a matter of right or wrong. Likewise, the proportions of interest in each aspect vary according to the individual.

But what is certain is that is that when it comes to sponsored sport, the spectacle element is necessary. Gambling go among pro gamblers can survive without spectacle - indeed, the participants would probably prefer to remain entirely hidden. But when sponsors, or club owners or the like, are involved, money-spending fans are necessary.

Spectacle fandom can also be broadly split into two elements. There are those who like to follow favourite players, and for them statistics can play an important part (how many titles has X won, etc). And there are those who don't know how many goals Messi has scored, or how many Ballons d'Or he has won, but they just like to watch him dribble his way through even the best defences. Of course, there will also be many who like to keep an interest in both elements, but my impression is that the dribble-oglers are in a big majority.

If we transfer this thinking to go, we can say that the reason we have pros is to produce game records, preferably of Messi-like quality. When spectacle fans play over games, they usually don't know what the time limits are, and quite possibly don't even care. Or what the prize money was. All they really care about is the quality of the game.

But the contest fan has different priorities. He actually wants to play the game himself, and become good at it. He may even dream of becoming a pro. He looks at pros playing with different eyes. He is not specially looking for quality; he is looking for angles he can use in his own play. So, in go terms, if he sees a pro successfully use a time suji or (or even drugs or AI), he is inclined to copy that. Never mind the quality, feel the width.

I personally find this a little bit of a problem in go (and chess) because it is an activity where it is so easy to join in as a contestant. If you are a baseball fan and want to play, you generally need to get some expensive equipment, find a lot of other players, and go somewhere far away to play. The result is that most fans in baseball, by far, are spectacle fans, not contest fans.

In go and chess it is quite different. Equipment costs are trivial, and essentially non-existent online. You need just one other person. And you can play in bed. I would estimate that the result is that contest fans of go far, far outweigh spectacle fans. Certainly in the west, but probably also in the Orient.

If that analysis is correct, I'd further expect that most go fans here would likewise tend towards the contest mentality (I am very firmly in the spectacle camp, however). Indeed, I think that is borne out by the type of discussions we get here. More often than not, it seems to me, we don't get true discussion, by which I mean trying to share ideas. We tend, instead, to get nit-picking and attempts at point scoring. The quality of the debate thus suffers. As it happens, on L19 we don't get much quantity to compensate. We do get a lot of "width," though: threads can deviate from the OP in the space of one reply! I will concede, however, that the present thread has been more than reasonable in all respects. So, we know it can be done...

Everybody likes to see high game quality, regardless of time settings or "timesujis". But even "timesujis", which are non-optimal, can be exciting for folks in the "spectacle camp". By "spectacle camp", I refer to fans who are interested in the spectacle, independently of interest in competing on their own.

There is something very exciting to me about watching a professional game live. It's totally different than replaying the game a few days later. I remember when Kim Myungwan and Andrew Jackson used to do commentary of big matches live on YouTube. I was there live, and could comment and read the comments of other people during the event.

It was truly exciting to feel the atmosphere during the tournament. I could speculate which moves were going to be play, and I could feel the tension throughout the game.

Sometimes the pros would make mistakes, and the commentators would explain why. The mistakes being made, while lowering the quality of the game, didn't detract from the excitement - it made things more exciting!

When time pressure came into effect, things were no different: even though the commentators and AI already "knew" who was going to win, in the live competition the result was uncertain and exciting. Maybe my favored player was behind. Given an optimally quality game, the result was already clear. But humans don't always play optimally, and the competition was still exciting!

These days, if you want the highest quality of go, as much as I hate to say it, you should probably just buy a nice GPU. But there's so much more to pro competition than that. Knowing a player, and feeling the excitement of live competition where humans make mistakes due to time, fatigue, or whatever... It's exciting, and I hope it continues!

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be immersed

One other thing I'd like to emphasize is that professional go is exciting exactly because the result of a match is uncertain. Yet, the level of play is high enough that amateurs have a lot to learn from the moves that come about under those circumstances.

I'll maintain, as I have before, that sometimes high level creative moves are possible exactly because of the pressures of competition - which can include time pressure.

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be immersed

The games I played that I have enjoyed the most are usually the ones without any time constraint, played at the local pub. And for a while, I used to dread the moment my opponent got into byoyomi during tournaments. In fact, I used do the opposite of what Shin did: play slower and sometimes play easy to answer moves when my opponents was low on remaining byoyomi time (luckily, I stopped this bad habit since).
So I sympathize with the general sentiment of the thread. Time constraint and clocks are a necessary(?) evil and I always disliked the fact that they became "part of the game" in chess.

The relativity of time also has influence in John's distinction: A "beautiful kifu", a "work of art", is something that is appreciated after it's finished, when the kifu is published in the newspaper. A spectacle is bet appreciated live (well... real-time) because uncertainty adds a lot to it, and in go that is possible only in the last decades. That accounts for shorter thinking times.

Also, I'm a simple man, I see 'Messi' I upvote but let me say that (1) Messi will and has scored a 'hand of god' goal. (2) millions here will admire Messi's gentleman play on TV on sunday and get on the dirtiest tricks on their own 'friendly' matches on monday.

Well they may watch Messi, but also others who are not exactly shining examples of playing cleanly ..
And don't forget millions more would also be ladylike/very gentlwomanly, gentlemanly in their own games, too. Personal identity comes into play here .

I feel like many of you commentating haven't had much tournament experience. Sorry, I just feel like it's a weird philosophical viewpoint. The clock is part of the game.