When did 6.5 komi start?

[nedpatrick]

All the books I have on go plus on Hikaru No Go komi is 5.5. Now it is 6.5. What year was this decided?

Ned

[emeraldemon]

http://senseis.xmp.net/?HistoryOfKomi

[jts]

Am I reading that page wrong? It looks like it's saying, for each value of komi, the years in which we have the first example of that komi in a given country. But it's not clear to me when Japanese professionals starting playing with 6.5 - was it 1984, the same year the Amateur Strongest Players started using it?

[yoyoma]

Yeah page doesn't seem to show when the Nihon Kiin changed official komi. I remember that Yukari Umezawa explained in one of the Hikaru No Go segments that the komi was changing from 5.5 to 6.5

[Bill Spight]

Am I reading that page wrong? It looks like it's saying, for each value of komi, the years in which we have the first example of that komi in a given country. But it's not clear to me when Japanese professionals starting playing with 6.5 - was it 1984, the same year the Amateur Strongest Players started using it?

No, it was after 2000. Back in '75 I predicted that the Nihon-Kiin would adopt a 6.5 komi before the turn of the century. I was wrong.

To the best of my knowledge the first amateur organization to adopt 6.5 komi was the New Mexico Go Association in '76.

[HermanHiddema]

http://senseis.xmp.net/?Komi gives a date of September 2002 for Japan officially going from 5.5 to 6.5, and other countries that use Japanese scoring followed quickly, IIRC.

[John Fairbairn]

To the best of my knowledge the first amateur organization to adopt 6.5 komi was the New Mexico Go Association in '76.

A swathe of amateur events used it in Japan from at least 1963 on. I expect this date to be pushed back as we at GoGoD continue to work through old magazines.

Komi itself goes back to around 1750, also in Japan, and the first pro use is also in Japan, from 1907 in individual games, from the early/mid 19th century in relay games.

http://senseis.xmp.net/?Komi gives a date of September 2002 for Japan officially going from 5.5 to 6.5, and other countries that use Japanese scoring followed quickly, IIRC.

Korea was the first to use 6.5 in pro events, in June 1998 (3rd LG Cup). Officially the changeover in Japan was announced in January 2003, and the first tournament to be affected was supposed to be the 10th Agon-Kiriyama Cup, which began on 24 February 2003. However, some Japanese pros had been playing with 6.5 komi in the open Phoenix Cup since 2001, and the Ricoh Pair Go Cup also jumped the gun in 2002. Also, unless the Nihon Ki-in records are faulty/lazy, 6.5 is given for many games before 24 February 2003 (i.e. preliminary rounds for events where the main rounds were after that date, but the date was clearly not a guillotine - some events that began before then kept the 5.5 komi until the final was played, and so the changeover was not complete until October 2003).

[gowan]

What is the story about 7.5 komi? If I recall correctly that was something Ing promoted and it was also used in amateur tournaments with Ing sponsorship. At first with 7.5 komi there were pros who chose White in the nigiri. Did the same thing happen with 6.5 komi?

[Bill Spight]

To the best of my knowledge the first amateur organization to adopt 6.5 komi was the New Mexico Go Association in '76.

A swathe of amateur events used it in Japan from at least 1963 on. I expect this date to be pushed back as we at GoGoD continue to work through old magazines.

Very interesting. In 1963 didn't almost all pro games in Japan use 4.5 komi? It is surprising that amateurs would make a 2 pt. leap at that time.

[John Fairbairn]

Very interesting. In 1963 didn't almost all pro games in Japan use 4.5 komi? It is surprising that amateurs would make a 2 pt. leap at that time.

No. For amateurs it was only a 1-point leap anyway.

The Oza began using 5.5 in 1955, just before the NHK Cup, and other events such as the Meijin and Judan followed suit in the very early 1960s. But the Honinbo and Nihon Ki-in Championship held out until 1975.

According to various articles discussing komi before and after the war (of which there were many), it seems that pro opinion had favoured a komi of 5 points for quite a long time. At the time, with few knockouts, there was no need to worry much about jigos. But amateurs had to worry about jigos in knockouts and they had been playing with 5.5 komi for a long time. When the time came, in 1949, for the pro world to write down its rules for the first time, they also had to make a decision on how to handle jigos. Since there were still many players who believed komi go was not go (it was not that they believed Black had no advantage - rather they believed, in those more leisurely days, that a contest should be settled on the basis of a series of games at traditional handicaps, e.g. B-W-B), a nod in their direction was made by unrounding 5 down to 4.5 instead of up to 5.5 as was then usual in the amateur world.

The amateur view was largely influenced by mathematical arguments. Indeed, Japanese amateurs were also adventurous early on with things like free handicaps, which are not as new as often claimed, and alternative rating systems. But pros were not specially antediluvian. Even among pros, there is also a long history of unusual komis being used in events such as the insei leagues (e.g. White giving komi, komi 2.5 points, etc). But in the frontline events, tradition had its place.

When the Oza began, the sponsors respected that by actually balloting pros. They voted by a large majority (22-2 if memory serves) for the large komi (5.5) around 1955 but diplomatically accepted retention the smaller komi in existing events. There was some confusion anyway, in that in quicker games at 4.5 komi Black was apparently winning almost nine out of ten games, but in the slow Honinbo only one out of three. They felt this must mean something, but no-one seemed to know quite what!

Japan's shift to 6.5 stemmed mainly from concern, even then in the late 1990s, over the risk of falling behind internationally. There doesn't seem to be much interest in a higher komi yet. The latest figures from Japan I've seen, in 2008, showed that a komi of 6.5 still leaves Black an edge, but a very slight one. In 19,702 games from 6 November 2002 up to 31 December 2007, Black won 50.59% and White won 49.41%.

A slightly crude comparison, of all games in the GoGoD database from 2008 on (8192 games), gives a Black win ratio of 50.4% and White 49.4% (0.2% void, jigo or unfinished).

Rather than achieve parity, 7.5 might just flip those figures, but there is no incentive to try it to find out.