i would like to know exactly and by example one or two would be nice, how you score oneself, as the game proceeds how do you know if you are ahead or behind without looking on the right to the score indicator i need to know exactly when i make a move weather i make a point or lose a point please show me, i know many other begineers don’t know like me, how to score a point or lose a point till the game is over thank you in advance
I don’t
just choose the best move
even if it not increases score, its better to choose move that decreases it as little as possible
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This doesn’t make much sense; Make or lose a point compared to what?
You mean according to the AI estimation, before and after you played that move? If you exactly knew the impact of each move you’d be better than even the top pros.
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here you made move that just decreases your territory and has no sense
and then again
you already surrounded that
you don’t need to use your stones_only to surround, edge of board works too
instead its better to increase your area around that overconcentrated building
that move is self atari, its just giving point to opponent, it makes no sense
opponent captured it on the next move
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Accurately gauging score during the game is a difficult skill. Strong players can make an estimate, which gets refined as they become stronger.
You’re not ready for this, and it’s not even remotely a topic that you should be worried about. As you’ve been advised repeatedly, you must learn beginner skills. That can come from doing go problems or via game experience.
Your errors are coming primarily from not understanding basic life-and-death. You continuously throw your stones away via self-atari. You continuously defend your own stones when they are already 100% safe.
It will require you to put forth some effort, but you can definitely learn to stop making these mistakes as often.
If you ever take this advice and start doing go problems, please ask for help if you don’t understand them.
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Here comes yet another platitude:
My suggestion (that @dokbohm will have read before) is FIRST to play through the wonderful interactive tutorials that exist – we even have one on OGS, comprehensible even for five year old children, IMHO.
After finishing this, many of the mistakes pictured above shouldn’t really happen.
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Nice one, again, @dokbohm. Good for another chuckle. Keep 'em coming.
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well thanks everyone for your input and pointing out all my mistakes over an over again sure does help what i was looking for and nowhere does it explain in any os tutorial guide how when one makes a move you determine if you scored a point or lost a point except od course when you lose a stone that is a given – on the example of my bad play shown above explain to me exactly my points and my opponents points so i can see what on each step i made what i loat and what i gained — that would be helpful thank you
I literally count my territory one by one. Im too stupid to keep a number in my mind while counting another group. Often I also forget my score once I finished counting my opponents points.
For gaining/ losing points, are you looking for something like this or this? Thats advanced stuff tho.
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yes tschej thats exactly or at least pretty close wthat i was looking for a method to score and this at least explains certain setups and how they figure out te score —- thank you some much for understnding what i was asking for this will help greatly once i understand reading my times i have mild dyslexia so understnding this printed word is harder but the pictures really helped again thanks
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@dokbohm I share your urge to know how each and every move might affect the game’s final score - so I empathize with such desire. But even being new to Go, I quickly concluded that there are so many variables that factor into the final game score (that cannot be known until near the very end) that trying to learn from an interim estimate of the final score winds up being more distracting than helpful in improving my playing skills.
Here’s an analogy:
A poker player certainly cares deeply about how large their pile of betting chips is. Nonetheless, there’s no meaningful information to be gleaned about how to play the current hand of cards by counting one’s chips.
The skills (plus luck) needed to successfully play one’s current hand are worthy of deep study and analysis. But in the end, the best way to affect the size of the pile of one’s chips has nothing to do with counting the chips. The best way is to focus intently on playing the current hand - and letting the chips fall where they may. 
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Unfortunately, your question caused a lot of confusion on the forum because - to most of the Go players here - it made no sense. It shows that you still misunderstand some fundamental aspects of the game in terms of how your stones eventually create secure areas of the board that can be counted as points for one side or the other.
The reason is - for most of the game - some areas of the board will be ambiguous and unresolved - meaning that
- one side has begun to enclose them, but hasn’t gotten very far, and so that area can still be invaded or reduced, and it’s impossible to tell how many points will go to which opponent, or
- that area has not yet been sufficiently claimed by either side, and so we have no way of knowing how that area will eventually be resolved
Here, let me show you an example. I’ve created this sample 13x13 game HERE
Here’s a snapshot of the game at Move 14. I’ve color-coded some areas where Black and White can be fairly confident that they’ve secured those parts of the board, and it would be difficult for the other to invade (Black has 2 areas on lower right and left, White has the upper left)
However, all of the areas shaded yellow are unresolved and ambiguous - the score could shift significantly based on what moves are played in those areas. As such, it’s not like a single stone played in that area could equal a point, or a certain amount of points. The situation will have to progress through a series of moves until those areas become more securely enclosed before that kind of counting is even possible.
If we fast-forward to Move 58, you can see that both sides have expanded their enclosures, and can now count more points as securely enclosed. The ambiguous and unresolved areas are smaller but - again - you can’t know which side those areas will belong to until those areas are resolved one way or the other. Until then they are in limbo - they belong to neither White nor Black
And here’s a picture of the Score Estimator evaluating the board once all of the borders have been resolved.
Black has enclosed 46 points of territory
White has enclosed 45 points of territory, they have 1 Black stone prisoner at D9, and they have 6.5 points of komi, so 45+1+6.5 = 52.5 points. White wins by 6.5 points
On the flip side of that coin, there are certain things you do repeatedly that directly impact your score, and that’s taking away your own points when your areas are already secure. User square_defender pointed this out above
Here your right side group enclosed 7 points - I’ve marked them so you can see them. This area of the board is un-ambiguous - you’ve closed all the borders and resolved any questions, so we can count those 7 points with confidence.
Now - as it is - this enclosure is 100% safe because there is no combination of moves that White can play to capture those stones completely. If White tries - Black can just capture those stones and still maintain 2 eyes to make life.
However, when you played those two stones at the edge at N8 and N7, you decreased the number of points enclosed to 5 points - I’ve marked them for you above. Do you understand how playing those stones reduced your points?
Lastly, I wanted to go back to another game you played a while ago - I can’t find it but it looked something like this:
In this game you were White. If I recall correctly, in the chat for this game, you were confused because you believed you “controlled the middle” or some words to that effect.
The thing is White’s wall on the K line doesn’t actually “control” anything - it doesn’t enclose any areas in such a way that White could kill any Black stones that are played - the way you could in the example above where you enclosed 7 points of territory
Here, the area on the left side of the board is so big - it is all still unresolved - it doesn’t belong to either White or Black because there is so much that can still happen. Black can literally play anywhere to the left of the White stones and still make life.
The thing is - it’s not enough to just have stones in that area - those stones have to enclose 2 or more eyes of territory to make life and create areas that cannot be captured by their opponent. Only then can those areas be resolved for one player or the other.
Does that make sense?
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We really need to make a collection of tonybes instructional posts somewhere!
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A good trick if you plan to count your territories, let say to compare with your opponent territories is to count only the really fully sure points, like if you always have to answer to all your opponents reduction. Do the same for your opponent territories.
Another trick is counting 2 by 2 instead of 1 by 1. Usually quicker.
Thanks all for the very informative couple of posts and diagrams, they made a lot of sense to me, and now with other reading i have a better understand of points – still a little unclear how to read while i play those points but it gives me somewhere to start again. Thanks to all for the input
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Below you can see the end of a game (that I made up) where you can practice counting the score (Japanese rules):
In the middle I did the counting for you, which is trivial: There are 12 free intersections fully surrounded by black. Hence, black gets 12 points for this territory at the end of the game.
We also have four corners. A triangle-corner, a square-corner, an X-corner and a circle-corner.
Now the questions for you @dokbohm are:
- How many points does black and white get for each corner?
- Why?
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I don’t know whether it’s been said already explicitly:
︎ IF you have territory, or at least prospective territory, that is: territory of which you have reason to believe it is or will be yours, AND …
︎ IF there are enemy stones in it that do not have a chance of living, that is: which do not need to be killed one by one or as a group,
… then every prospective prisoner counts as TWO points, because:
︎ it is one point of territory for you, plus …
︎ as every prisoner will be placed inside the enemy’s territory after the game – we really do this in Real Life games! – this also means that every prisoner is one point less for the opponent!
Thus, when counting territory (which I, admittedly, rarely do during the game), I often count like this:
“2 … 4 … 6 … 7 … 8 … 9 … 11 … 13 … 14 …”
(Just an example, the numbers are different every time, of course, but THAT I needn’t tell you, do I?)
Have I made myself understandable? To know the mentioned facts is important in order to answer @FritzS’s question above.
(Sometimes I feel awkward when explaining things because English is not my mother tongue, and I often am not sure whether I have described things clearly enough.)
3 POINTS FOR WHITE ONE FOR BLACK DON’T REALLY KNOW THE ANSWER BASICALLY JUST GUESSED
why is this so hard to understand is a cross hairs point on the board a point or not is a stone taken a point or not and why does the ai score indicator change when you just push the button somtime several times even though no move was made ??? iam sorry but iam a simple maybe even stupid olld fellow but i really do want ot understand what iam doing instead of as many here have said i do, just plunk the stones down randamly and with out reason.
@dokbohm, I give you credit for responding to my questions. I really do.
Answering these questions is not trivial at all. (Which is the reason why it is pretty challenging to pick up the game of Go in the first place.)
However, being able to answer these questions is essential if you ever want to play the game of Go at any reasonable level.
Because of the answers not being easy, it’s best to take some time and work on one corner at a time.
Let’s pick the easiest first: The “square-corner” on the upper right:
White has completely surrounded two empty intersections there (marked A and B) which are not connected to each other.
Now the question is: Can black play at either A or B?
The answer is: No!
Playing a black stone at either point is not possible as that black stone would neither capture any white stone(s) nor would it have any liberties there. Black would need to play at A and B simultaneously in order to capture the white stones. However, playing two stones at the same time is not allowed of course.
We say: “The white group in the upper right corner has two eyes.”
Having two eyes (or being able to create two eyes) is the minimum requirement for a group of stones to be “alive” and to stay on the board after the game has ended. Stones that are not part of a group that has at least two eyes at the end of the game are considered “dead” and do count as points for the opponent.
Because of white being alive in the upper right corner, white gets two points (one for A and one for B) for that corner.
Black on the other hand doesn’t get any points for that corner!
As I said, this is not trivial. And you might need to read and think about this explanation over and over again before it starts making sense.
This is perfectly normal and you should not move on before you understand this explanation.
As soon as you do, I would recommend looking at the “X-corner” on the lower right next.
Any idea how many points there are for black and for white?
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