I’ve just finished a game with someone who took an extraordinarily long time to make moves - They won, so maybe I’m just being a poor loser, but I can’t help wondering what they were doing in the five minutes or so it took them to make some of these moves. Also if there’s something that I’m missing - a tool or a tactic, then I’d appreciate it if someone could point me at it.
As it is i probably won’t play this person again, just because it’s a pain waiting that long to make a move - although I suppose it’s better to have my thinking time on their clock…
There can be multiple reasons, from Real Life interfering, going to the toilet, thinking about the move, having fun to keep you waiting to using a bot to calculate moves. Anything is possible.
In my opinion, you should not be too suspicious, only very few people take long turns with malicious intent.
I would suggest to not take live games with very long times, especially if you like to play quick.
Yeah - well one thing it wasn’t was the toilet - or if it was then i diagnose dysentery. It’s no big deal I suppose. I mean whoever was making the moves, it was a learning experience. The only thing is that the clock timings were obviously set up to accommodate long thinking times, so it was fairly obviously part of their style of play, and to be honest the waiting for moves to be made, plus my naturally suspicious nature sucked all of the enjoyment out of the game for me. I don’t mind losing, but I really don’t like that feeling that something’s going on that I can’t see.
FWIW I spent a few years in uniform and I honed my paranoia to a very keen edge - It’s been very good to me over the years
I think the most likely explanation for a player often spending a lot of time to make some moves over the course of a game is simply that he or she is choosing to carefully thinking about those moves. It’s quite normal for players to spend a lot of time, if they have it available on their clock, to read out possible variations or solve life/death situations.
It seems like a bit of a stretch to think that a slow player is using a bot, since doing so wouldn’t necessarily require significantly more time. If anything, playing very quickly or never varying in tempo, especially when complicated fights or difficult strategic decisions arise, seems more characterisitic of someone feeding moves to a bot.
If you think the pace is too slow, I would recommend playing games with tighter time controls. Otherwise, trying to play quickly against an opponent that is fully utilizing the clock for careful consideration will only put you at a disadvantage.
Well - I have no idea what it would take to feed moves to a bot, or even that it was possible until this. Thing is, unless you played the game you wouldn’t really be able to say whether or not my spidey sense was wrong or otherwise. All I know is the game was no fun for me. and nobody else I’ve ever played has ever taken so long to make moves.
I guess the only thing to do is give them the benefit of the doubt and just not play them again. Bottom line is that the waiting sucked, no matter what the cause of it was.
I don’t want to be rude, but what you are posting here is just asking for a comment.
Why do players take a long time to think? Because Go is a complicated game and it is worth spending time on playing it properly.
In my own games, most of my opponents will not use up their time even when the game is played out to the end. I believe that this is a mistake, just as if they were deviating from a joseki sequence. This opinion follows from my assumption that more thinking will always tend to make my moves better and that I want to play my best.
Add to that the fact that I just suck at blitz. I’m just not that fast. I need time to find normal moves, sometimes a few minutes.
Now you’re writing in this forum with the implication that your slow opponent may be doing something dishonest or wrong. I can say with confidence that it is you who made the mistake. If you do not like to wait, try 30s+3x10s byo-yomi.
Well - I’m not trying to imply dishonesty, but it’s hard to avoid that with a query of this type. The fact is, I found the time my opponent was taking unusual so I asked a question about it. You will note that I made the point that if there was a tool, or tactic that I didn’t know about, then I wanted to. I was thinking about using the analysis tools in-game, which I have up until now thought of as too costly in time apart from any other consideration. Apart from anything else whatever he/she was doing worked, so if I’m missing something, I want to know about it. Yes I admit I have something of a suspicious nature, but I’m not going to apologise for that, it’s saved my life from time to time.
I take your point about using the clock time - Maybe that’s the lesson I need to take away from this, because I’m frequently tripped up by a lack of attention to detail.
It would be great if people were generally trustworthy - and actually people generally are, but nonetheless, people do cheat. I don’t know how that might be done on here, or even if it can be, but I’ve never yet come across an online forum where some dishonesty wasn’t happening. It’s a fact of life.
Anyway, I appreciate your reply, and I think you’re probably right, but I had to ask the question anyway.
I’m not a fan of the analysis tool. I guess if it’s enabled, it’s not cheating to use it. But I don’t think it helps me to become a better player when I use it, and it slows down my opponent to an annoying degree if he uses it in a live game. In a correspondence game, it distorts the rankings.
My takeaways are … disable analysis when I set up a game, and don’t play live games with excessively long time settings. Other than that, I think the other factors are out of my control.
