Deciding winner based on prisoners and territories rather than timeout

Hi guys, I’m new to the site here. I’m hosting a private rapid tournament where the timing is set to absolute 10 minutes (because we have limited time for the event). So after testing, I found out that if a player runs out of time, their opponent will win by timeout

Is there a rule where if one player runs out of time, it will be so that the AI will stop the game and decide the winner by counting prisoners/territories, and not just give the win to the one who still has time?
Or is there some other rule that will limit players’ time to 10 minutes?

If there’s no other way to do that, then I will just ask the players to both skip when one player reaches below 30 seconds or something.

Your help is appreciated :smiley:

If such a rule as you suggest were adopted, a cheater could just time out deliberately when they are ahead but facing an unavoidable reversal of the situation. It is unworkable and contrary to the purpose and nature of time limits.

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Welcome to the forum!

If you have to stop.in 2x10mn then absolute 10mn is the only way to be sure to not go longer.

A 10mn absolute is managable by players (but almost an ultra blitz, very quick)
It’s a bit unfair between a quick player and a slow one who will have spent more time for a better result to let him not lose on time.
Maybe you can put no time limit and ask everyone to stop at a fixed hour? (Using pause with unranked games) Then the tourmament organizers decide the result for each game according to their criteria.

Good idea, maybe I’ll set it to blitz and limit one move to 10 seconds :thinking:

That’s no more a guaranty to be in less as 20mn

1move/10s
6 /mn
60 /10mn
120/ 20mn

a game is like 250-350 moves, sometimes more…

We’re testing for 13x13 or 9x9 so it should take less time

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One way to stop the game is to write in the chat of each game yourself “end”
So you get automatically a timestamp and what was the last move number. You will still have to ask everyone to stop playing after a fixed time, because they can’t read what you write in the game chat before the end of the game. Workable if not too many players.

Counting only sure territory and prisoners before the end makes the game a variant of go, not go. Strategy may differ, and the result very different as it ought to be if the game was not interupted. Anyway make sure the games will be unranked.

Finishing the game with AI is not in the spirit of OGS as external help is not appreciated here.

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Try Fisher time, something like 7 min main time + 2s additional time per move.

A 120 move-game will last at most 18 minutes.

A game longer than 20 minutes would require at least 180 moves, which is unlikely for a game on 13x13.

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Thanks! I’ll test this tomorrow. :blush:

Try Canadian byoyomi

You can get a pretty good time-control and flexible time management for players. Set a bit longer period and more moves, makes it more flexible (since some responses like yose and joseki don’t have to think, where they can spend more time on really hard moves). 3 mins per 20 moves will guarantee a game with 180 moves always finishes within 9x3 = 27 mins, etc. (usually they end much earlier, since players normally won’t play to the last second per period).

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