I know it's an old post, but...



This works, eh?


Reading this thread has been eye-opening. When I watched Hikaru No Go, I assumed the 'Divine Move' was just a melodramatic plot point, but it isn't, is it? Sounds like everyone here is struggling to reach the completely unattainable goal of being Good Enough at Go. The next time I feel like crying because I suck so much, it will cheer me up to remember that those of you who could give me a nine-stone handicap, play with your head submerged in tapioca, and still beat me, feel the exact same way.

What I don't like about Go:
The GOOD equipment costs so much, and I have this terrible craving to own the premium stuff I can't afford.

It is stealing time from my other non-productive obsessive/compulsive pursuits.

I have to quit and play Age of Empires to remind myself what winning feels like.

I too hate games when the opponent doesn't know when to resign. It even happend that I got nervous and tried to finish game quickly. Then I made some careless mistakes and collapsed. It's my fault of course. I try to learn something from it

Do people really feel that strongly about opponents who don't resign? I tend not to resign unless I'm very far behind, because (i) we're kyus, so seriously, we have no idea what could happen, (ii) I can't count, and (iii) it's still fun.

And likewise, when I win by 30 pts. it doesn't even cross my mind to be upset at my opponent.

I get really bored when someone is far behind and won't resign. So bored, in fact, that I'll lose the game from sheer apathy, as I stop reading anything.

Yes, I really hate it when I'm winning by 30+ points in an online game and my opponent isn't even trying to come back. If we're still early in the game when they fall behind or if they try to start a complicated fight once falling behind I don't blame them, but if they act like they don't even care that they're 30 points behind at the 2k+ level and keep playing to the end I find it to be a complete waste of time, and I will add them to my ignore list on KGS.

There's a sort of sliding scale as to when it starts to become rude to not resign IMO. When I was a DDK, I often couldn't tell if I was winning or losing when I was winning (or losing) by 50+ points. We'd also be constantly making huge mistakes, until the very end of the game, so I don't think not resigning is rude at all at that level.
But once you reach the professional level, you'll rarely see a game be won by 7 or more points because the loser will recognize that it is hopeless and give up before then. Yet if I'm winning or losing by less than 7 points I'll be on the edge of my seat, knowing the game could swing either way still.

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We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

Play at the 1-1 points or pass, they'll get the message .

I'm bad at counting in a regular game, and abominable under any kind of time pressure. So I'm often on the wrong end of playing out a hopeless situation. But I do feel guilty. And when I can count well enough to figure out it's hopeless, I resign.

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Occupy Babel!

I disagree on the resigning thing. If I'm inescapably behind but I think the rest of the game looks fun, I'll play it rather than resigning. /Unlike Araban, I am not so skilled that even a completely generic endgame is necessarily boring to me.

And as ethanb mentioned, you get to try temperature raising moves (ko and sente instead of connect!) that you normally wouldn't.

What does get my goat are speculative "maybe my opponent will bungle connecting this peep inside his territory!!!!!" plays (its always a rueful laugh when you do bungle it). If it requires appreciable reading I don't mind; inside-territory-tesuji do turn up from time to time. Also in this boat is speculative dame filling. Filling dame of a group that requires reading one move in the future to check it doesn't care about dame liberties in the hope of gaining a point is bad. I don't mind filling dame to encourage your opponent to connect false eyes, but if you fill some completely neutral dame, you better be planning to fill the rest of them too (in perhaps childish pique, I always fill a bunch of dame myself after my opponent "tries" this).

So I guess what annoys me about go is "opponents who make no-thought-refutable plays".

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Revisiting Go - Study Journal
My Programming Blog - About the evolution of my go bot.

I can respect that--occasionally a game seems too interesting to resign. Like maybe it's the last kill of a total bloodbath, and you have a hard time telling, but you think you might lose by a bunch even if you do manage to kill. In that case, just fight like crazy.

But there's a lot of games where nothing interesting is available. Realizing you've played one of those out and lost by a lot is sad.

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Occupy Babel!

Hmmm. Despite the fact that I tend to resign early and count poorly, I basically never mind games where I'm ahead and my opponent doesn't resign. I mean, it's kind of like a victory lap. I get to enjoy winning for longer. It's a shallow and selfish pleasure, kind of like bragging, but it's your opponent who's making the choice to drag it out.

Obviously I feel bad if I lose a won game, but (unless I need to be somewhere else pronto) I tend not to mind playing out a game.

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

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Keep in mind, I am frequently wrong.

This aduma guy seems to do that a lot, in ranked games. Looks like something admins should handle.

Sometimes it is ridiculous if an opponent continues to play and he has like two major groups that have been captured. I often start to take the last liberties of those groups and eventually capture them off the board, even if filling those liberties does cost me points. Often this helps and they get the message.

Maybe I should try passing instead and see if that works, too.

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Stay out of my territory! (W. White, aka Heisenberg)

One problem with the pass technique is that they may then pass themselves, and all the sudden you're in scoring with a half-finished game.

On KGS you can just cancel and resume the game. You can then ask them if they took the effort to count. Most of the time I've done it though they'll either play for a few more moves before resigning or just get the message and resign.

I start playing the 1-1 points, then the 1-2 points, etc. I also play dame and see if I can win by only a few points.

Eventually, they resign.

top 10 things i hate about GO.
10. i often call it baduk so people can find the game on the internet, but many who know the game look at me funny when i call it that.
9. i can only read about 2-3 moves into a position, unless its something obvious like an easy ladder. i suspect i'll never reach dan level status because of this.
8. while i generally have a good idea of direction of play, i'm never quite sure what qualifies as the biggest move.
7. i often feel i haven't learned anything new. win or lose, my game hasn't improved in a while.
6. i can't play nicely. against begginers, i bully them so much on the board, i fear they may never play again.
5. i often vary my play as much as possible. for example, i'll play 3-4 one day, and 5-5 the next. i do this to confuse the heck out of my opponent, but in truth it confuses me as well.
4. on the smaller boards, i feel the game is less strategic and more like using your dead stones to their max.
3. handicaping in tournament play. this never made much sence to me. if you're a better player you should get the win. if not, then not.
2. escapers! just resign.
1. i am capable of beating myself at a four stone handicap. yeah...

This is weird to me, as when I'm winning by huge margins I like to win by even huger margins. It's not a great strategy, since it complicates the game, but if you're losing won games anyway...

Never resign games against me, as I enjoy nothing more than capturing 60+ stone groups and marking them as dead during counting It provides a nice catharsis/denouement. A resign in the middle of a game always feels like "and then everyone died. The end" in the middle of a story.

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1k KGS

To me not resigning is like the story reached a climax with a satisfying ending, but then continues for 400 pages talking about the main character's taste in clothing.

I pretty much agree. Though, if you screw up during those 400 pages, your opponent gets a surprise ending...

When I know I have won, I don't particularly mind if the person does not resign, but I try to be careful that the ending is as I expect it to be.

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be immersed