We played a game in which intuitively white was winning by quite a lot, but after we both passed the points were counted in such a way that Black won (there were a few . This also made my ranking drop. Is there anything I can do in this situation?
Game in question: IGLO
Thank you very much!
For counting to work you need to close the borders properly. The game wasnāt over yet, neither of you should have passed.
You can ask a moderator to annul the game. (Not sure if theyāll do it, but worth a try.)
I called the moderator and reported it as āother.ā Clicking the āreport userā button felt kinda awkward, as my oponent did nothing wrong. Weāll see how it goes.
You are 15k, donāt you know you need to surround areas for them to be territory?
Thatās fine, Iām sure the mods donāt mind.
Just for your own enjoyment of the game: make sure you understand what went wrong there. Ask, if you donāt.
Itās definitely a great lesson that human beings and computers look at a Go board in a very different way 
I only started playing online recently, most of my experience is offline games, where this wouldnāt be an issue.
Oh, but it would! You canāt count the game in the state you ended it, thatās simply impossible.
To explain a bit: can you tell me if F18 belongs to black or to white? And if you can, can you explain why? After that note that A5 is in the same area as F18, so needs to be given to the same player.
You are correct, itās impossible to count the points. However, a human intuitively knows that the chances of Black making a comeback from that board are minuscule. In an offline game the distinction between passing because the game is fully played out and passing as resigning (thereās no point in continuing the game) tends to be lot more fuzzy than on a server (at least in my experience). If my oponent and me disagreed about the result, we would simply continue playing, and got the game to a point in which we would be able to count the points.
OK, I see your point. But in that case you black is basically resigning without actually saying that. That is somewhat different from the formal rules of go, but who cares if both are happy. The server though doesnāt know about any agreement or assumed resignation, so it takes the two consecutive passes as a sign to begin counting, which doesnāt work.
So in this sense you may be right about a difference between online and offline play. But to be honest Iāve never seen such a āpass-passā as assumed resignation between experienced players. I recommend sticking to the more formal procedure: explicitly resign ar close the borders and count.
I guess this is a question of local culture. I would say that the distinction irl is usually very clear. Either one player resigns or you play to counting. I can see that if is near the end of the game you might say something like āIām sure Iāve lost so should resign but do you mind if we go to countingā at which point you might play out the last moves quickly to enable counting.
Or if itās too close to tell then you definitely have to play out to the end.
Tldr, passing is not the same as resigning irl either
This is not a thing.
In casual real-life games Iāve played on a physical board, there is a pretty clear difference. In normal friendly and casual games, casual enough to where Iām chatting with my opponent or other people as we play, for games that go to scoring, a typical ending of the game might go like like:
āOkay, looks like thatās just about it, I donāt see anything left, so I passā.
āYep, I pass tooā
and then we count.
or this kind of thing might happen:
āOkay, looks like thatās just about it, I donāt see anything left, so I passā.
āWhat about this?ā (plays at a potential weak point inside the other personās area, the second move in a row by this player because the first player just passed).
āI think I can just defend like thisā (responds)
āAh, right, okay I pass tooā.
Not uncommonly the āpassā moves are omitted in highly casual settings, but when they are, there is usually verbal reference to the game being done (i.e. literally no useful moves left) and that both sides are explicitly agreeing that this is the case:
āI donāt see anything left to play, shall we count?ā
āYepā
(In this case, the online server equivalent can only be to explicitly pass, of course, since the server isnāt going to understand chat by the players about there being no endgame moves left)
Whereas in case of a player having lost and ending the game early, in a casual chatty game it might happen like this:
āThat fight really didnāt go well for me, can we stop here?ā
āSureā
or
āHuh, that fight really didnāt go well for me, can we stop here and review how that happened?ā
āSureā
And even in highly casual settings, in the clubs Iāve been in, explicitly using the word āresignā is not uncommon too:
āI resign. I really didnāt expect that group to die there!ā
(In all of the above cases, the online server equivalent would of course be for the player who acknowledges they lost and who is initiating the early stopping of the game, to click the resign button).
Comparing the two kinds of cases above, scoring vs resignation, even in the implicit cases, there still isnāt much overlap in final things one would say and confirm with the opponent between scoring vs resignation. This is driven by the fact that game ending for scoring is necessarily by mutual agreement of there being no useful moves leftā¦ whereas game ending by resignation is unilateral and asking the other side if itās okay to stop the game early is more a matter of politeness rather than it actually being up to them to agree if the game is over.
Are you saying that in your social group, players often mix up these two kinds of ways of ending the game, or sometimes even mutually pass in order to indicate resignation? That would certainly be a very confusing norm to have!
Iāve only seen this in case someone resigns just after a blunder, and asks to count the game without the blunder. For instance, failing to notice an atari during the endgame. The player whoās stones got captured resigns, but then says, ādo you mind if we count what the score would have been if I had answered the atari?ā. Then the players undo the blunder, fill the remaining endgame moves quickly, and count the game.
