The Ethics of Playing Provisional Players

General Go Discussion
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I believe it can only be hurtful to put restrictions on “teaching games” unless you first give some very precise but very arbitrary definition of what a teaching game is. I’m pretty sure five people hearing the words “teaching game” will think of five different things.

As an example, I’m playing on the sitewide ladders, which means that I can be challenged to a ranked game without handicap at anytime, by anyone who is close enough to me on the ladder. The challenger can easily be someone who is much much weaker than me in rank, even though they’re close enough in ladder position.

Should we not be allowed to play such a ranked game however we want to play it?

Crushing a weaker player is not a particularly interesting experience, neither for them nor for me. Perhaps I’ll play “teaching moves”, avoiding moves that rely solely on reading-skills, and preferring moves that rely on simple strategic principles and good shapes. That would certainly fit what I call a “teaching game” and I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be allowed. I wouldn’t be very comfortable playing on OGS if anything like this was forbidden and there was someone reviewing each of my games and judging whether I have been giving every game my all and trying to crush every of my opponents.

In other words:

The important thing is playing go. Whether the game is ranked or unranked, that’s secondary.

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My view is instead guided by what I believe should be expected in a ranked game. Thus, I’m not trying to define this sort of rule around the precise concept of a teaching game, but instead based on the notions of what is specifically allowable in ranked games.

Since ranked games affect the rating system and people generally expect fairly and seriously contested competition, I expect the following in a ranked game:

  • Both players play fairly and make an honest effort that aims to represent the best of their own abilities.
  • Neither player obtains outside assistance (except that joseki dictionary usage is allowed for correspondence).
  • Throwing games, deliberately playing weaker moves, or otherwise intentionally misrepresenting one’s rank is not allowed. This includes forbidding sandbagging.
  • The outcome should not be prearranged or fixed, but instead be the result of a proper contest of skill.

The concept of teaching game is quite broad, but often such games involve at least one player (typically the one perceived to be stronger) not necessarily focusing on playing what they think are the best possible moves, but instead deliberately suboptimal moves that create opportunities and situations where the other player could possibly exploit and learn from. Also, some teaching games involve ample discussion and shared analysis between the players, making the game no longer a contest of individual skill, but rather a collaborative effort of learning and choosing moves. Sometimes, especially when the student is a beginner, the teacher deliberately tries to throw the game, or at least tries to keep the game very close, in order to either avoid discouraging a new player or preserve opportunities for the student to find interesting moves. Usually, teaching games should not be about the teacher trying their best to win, but rather trying their best to teach. Thus, I think the above sort of characteristics of typical teaching games make them incompatible with being ranked.

I do understand that some might have other, broader definitions of what may count as a teaching game. For example, some might say that a game between two players of very different skill constitutes a teaching opportunity, since it might no longer offer a realistic likelihood of the weaker player winning. Some might even broadly call such situations “teaching games”, even if both players play such a game to the best of their abilities, do not discuss the game during play or offer advice to each other, and do not use outside assistance. However, I would not really consider games that are essentially played within the restrictions and expectations of a normal ranked games to be “teaching games”, and frankly cringe at the idea of even calling such situations “teaching”, as stomping on a student does not seem like such an effective form of education to me.

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may decrease rank at first, but after some practice it may start to work better than normal moves because weaker moves may be more easy to understand than normal moves

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When I was a kyu player, I have had the chance to receive teaching games exactly like what you describe in this paragraph (except in real life rather than on a go server), every week for several years, with several different teachers, and I have improved a lot as a result of these teaching games. I’m pretty sure that’s the kind of teaching games that most teachers offered when they said “teaching games”. Indeed, they mostly all agreed that giving advice during the game was not nearly as efficient as a learning opportunity than letting the student play without advice, then reviewing the game once it’s ended. So I’m a bit surprised when you say you would ‘frankly cringe at the idea of even calling such situations “teaching”’.

Your argument appears to rely on the fact that in a teaching game, a player should always only ever play moves that give them the best chance of winning. That sounds extremely imperative, and indeed I would probably stop playing on OGS if there was such a requirement. Sometimes I want to try strategies that are different than the strategies I’m most used to. Of course this results in suboptimal moves. Sometimes I want to try sequences that are different than the strategies I’m most used to. Of course this results in suboptimal moves. Sometimes I want to try moves that rely more on strategy and less on reading. Of course this results in suboptimal moves. And sometimes I want to try moves that rely more on reading, and less on basic principles, and that results in suboptimal moves too.

Sacrificing the immediate probability of winning, but increasing the fun and the learning, both for me and for my opponent.

The main message in Takemiya’s “Cosmic go” book is that the game becomes much, much more interesting when players stop thinking of go as something as binary as “win or lose”. It would be terribly sad if following that advice was forbidden in OGS ranked games.

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@ArsenLapin1, it really sounds like the bulk of your woes is the difficulty in getting unranked games on OGS.

As @yebellz says, ideally, the purpose of a ranked game is to measure the strength of the players. That’s what the word “ranked” means. The ranking system would be a mess if people didn’t take it at least a little bit seriously.

In fact, after reading your comments, this is a hypothesis I have: maybe the ranking system is a mess, and it’s because people don’t take it seriously enough.

You’re basically saying that it’s worth sacrificing the accuracy of the ranking system for the sake of fun and learning, but ideally, fun and learning is what unranked games are for (well, you can have “competitive fun” in ranked games too I guess); but since in most situations on OGS (tournaments, ladders) you are forced to play ranked, you’re saying that it’s bad to force players to only focus on trying to win in ranked games.

Essentially, you seem to implicitly be saying that if you had the opportunity to turn all your games against much weaker or stronger players into unranked games, you’d have no problems with forbidding ranked teaching games (which I believe would be a reasonable point of view, this is not a rhetorical reductio ad absurdum).

@yebellz, I hate to be a pedant cough but it seems to me that, from a pragmatical perspective, your only problem with teaching games being ranked is really the fear that they would upset the ranking system by leading to incorrect results.

I have good news for you: the ranking system as of now only takes wins or losses into account, it doesn’t account for how “overwhelmingly” a game is won or lost (AFAIK).
In other words, the ranking system won’t see any difference between the teacher mercilessly crushing the student or winning by one point deliberately.

So it feels like, if we ignore the idealistic vein of you comment, your reasoning should converge to “ranked teaching games can be allowed if the teacher is clearly much stronger and the teacher wins the game”, wink wink, rather than “ranked teaching games are an oxymoron and shouldn’t be allowed”.

So to address the less pragmatical and idealistic aspect, as hopefully you can see from ArsenLapin’s replies, you’re living a pipe dream if you think people on OGS always take ranked games seriously.

In fact, it sounds like the main thing of your post is idealizing both teaching games and ranked games, and saying “in my mind’s utopia, they’re incompatible, thus I will vote against allowing the two things to go together”.

In my mind’s utopia, the best political system is one where an oligarchy has absolute power, extreme governing competence, and is incorruptibly aligned with the interests of the people. Does that mean I should vote for the abolition of democracy?

(This was a rhetorical reductio ad absurdum, although many people in the world apparently would see no problem with what I just said)

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I haven’t particularly tried to get unranked game, as in general I don’t see any reason to play an unranked game over a ranked game. So I don’t know how hard getting an unranked game is. But no matter whether it was difficult or easy, I would still play more ranked games than unranked games, unless getting ranked games was difficult for some reason. So, no, the possible difficulty of getting unranked games doesn’t have much to do with what I was saying. Also, I wasn’t expressing “woes” against the current state of OGS, but against future hypothetical restrictions that were discussed in this thread.

I also believe that the statement “the purpose of a ranked game is to measure the strength of the players” is a fallacy. Yes, the purpose of the ranking system is to measure the strength of the players. Yes, the purpose of setting the game as ranked rather than unranked is to measure the strength of the players. But the purpose of actually playing the game is to play go, first and foremost. I don’t think many players wake up in the morning and think “Oh, shoot, my OGS rank is no longer accurate, so I should play a game today”. And I don’t think many players wake up in the morning and think “Oh, my OGS rank is already accurate, so I shouldn’t play today”.

We have a ranking system because we play games. Not the other way around.

Again, even when I create games via the “create games” button, I choose “ranked” and not “unranked”. I don’t understand your argument at all in these two paragraphs. You’re arguing that by playing ranked games rather than unranked games, I am sacrificing the accuracy of the ranking system? It seems to me that it’s the exact opposite. If I was playing unranked games rather than ranked games, then I would be sacrificing the accuracy of the ranking system, since the only way the ranking system can have any idea of my rank at all, is if my games are ranked and not unranked.

I don’t know where you’ve read that I was “implicitly saying that under some hypothetical circumstances, I would have no problems with forbidding ranked teaching games”. I think I have said it explicitly many times on this thread already but I’ll say it again: I think forbidding ranked teaching games would always be a terrible idea, even under hypothetical circumstances where I can magically turn all my games unranked.

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Do I understand you correctly that you believe that the way I play go is somehow not serious enough?

What does that even mean?

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In your specific case, you appear to have not significantly improved in years, so your rank would be accurate for a long time even if you stopped playing ranked games altogether.

In general, any player that isn’t in the process of a fast improvement only really needs to play a ranked game once in a while (say, once a week?) to keep their rank accurate, or as accurate as our current system allows, I believe.

Since you’re deliberately playing ranked games where you’re not actually doing your best to win, thus lowering your chance of winning and in practice making it more similar to that of a weaker player, yes, you are muddying the accuracy of the ranking system. I don’t know how strong the effect of it is, or if it might be counter-balanced by other phenomena, but you are introducing a bias in the system.

If a lot of players do the same, which seems reasonable, this might actually be causing or contributing to the upwards rating drift OGS seems to be experiencing.

Also, here’s another metaphor:

I’m performing an experiment where I need to measure the period of a pendulum. Since I can’t measure with perfect accuracy, I will take a lot of measurements and average them, and hope that the errors in any single measurement cancel out in the average.

Since I like having fun, I decide sometimes to blow air on the pendulum while measuring the period with a handheld chronometer, thus possibly slowing it down and altering the measurement ever so slightly.

My supervisor notices that and says: “Wtf, do you realize you’re introducing a bias in the data by doing that? Don’t include the measures you made when you were blowing on the pendulum”

Obviously I reply:

“What are you talking about, the more measures I take the more accurate the calculation will be, obviously. Why would I not include the measures that I know are biased?”

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it may be useful to measure rank of different strange strategies to later choose the one with higher rank
also, its possible to hate playing normally.

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Nice metaphor. I suppose “blowing air” stands for the way I play go.

This is my last reply in this thread. I really, really hoped we could have a friendly discussion. But for some reason that I don’t understand, this is turning into personal attacks against my playing style.

I’m going to choose to be naive once more, and assume that there is still possibility that this is all due to a misunderstanding, although at this point it’s become really hard to understand your words in any way other than as “I don’t like the way you play go”.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I’m not actually angry at you nor offended. I don’t believe you are actually trying to be mean. But still I think it’s best if I stop being part of this discussion.

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I honestly think this segment of the post is out of line.

It’s one thing to question or posit ideas for new game modes, ranked unranked, teaching and their consequences, but I think it’s unfair and unrelated to start discussing another users approach to the game, their progress etc.

I would discourage this kind of tangent.

If you do want to continue this discussion I would consider it useful if you summarised your status on the thread at hand, because it seems to meander a bit before I would argue it went off topic.

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Well, hopefully you haven’t muted this thread already, but:

It is a misunderstanding, I didn’t say “your way of playing Go isn’t serious”, I said you arguably might be taking ranked games not seriously enough (for the system to work “properly”).

And blowing air was just the only way I could think of in the metaphor to invalidate the measure. The ranking system is trying to measure your true strength, and you’re hiding your true strength from the system.

I never said, and I don’t think, you should sacrifice playing fun and instructive games with weaker player, I meant that, assuming one gives priority to “keeping the ranking system accurate”, then you should only do so in unranked games.

And I never said I do give absolute priority to the ranking system over “nice” games, you know, in case you have forgotten how this thread started.

@shinuito
I was afraid that comment on Lapin’s rank might be taken that way, but I was only replying in a “cold scientific” way to his question: would him not playing ranked games negatively affect the accuracy of his rank?

I apologize, perhaps I should have avoided it, since it kinda sounds like a personal jab.

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image
What if I told you, that true strength do not exist and you are free to change your style every month and never return to old ones?

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One could claim that all games are teaching games as long as someone learns something from them ^^

I have had normal ranked tournament games which have turned into teaching games somewhere along the way, i’ve accepted ranked challenges as teaching games, and i’ve also used ladders to snipe stronger players for teaching games xD

Like this topic has shown us, everyone has their own understanding of what teaching game should look like so its prolly not very wise to include that on ToS in any form. Not until theres especially a button for “teaching games” on /play page.

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Yes this is how it sounded to me. I think there should be a way to phrase what you want to say, in a way that isn’t open to misinterpretation as an insult.

In any case, thank you for the response that you gave.

There’s a lot to take in in this thread overall.

  • My understanding is that the original idea spawned from wanting to play ranked games with beginners. I don’t really see a problem with that, the ladder allows it, even though there are some issues with challenges otherwise blocking rated games between players more than 9 ranks apart. It’s an inconsistency that should probably be revisited again.

  • It meandered into whether the terms of service allowed you to help your opponent during the game, which I can’t imagine not being a grey area. Once you try nail it down, it’ll nearly sound like you end up prohibiting chatting with your opponent. Technically a mundane comment like “nice move” could be interpreted as an affirmation that your opponent chose something you also agree is good, and maybe affirming some of the natural variations following it.

  • Should you help your opponent to the point you’re basically playing yourself? Probably not in a ranked game. I’ve seen some people that maybe enjoy correcting a beginner or improving players move during the game, and letting them play with the “better move”. I don’t personally enjoy that, but I think once you do it enough, you are no longer really playing your opponent at their level, so I don’t think it makes sense as a ranked game.

I don’t think I would outright discourage if the opponent said “is this a good move yes/no” and you’d kind of agreed you wouldn’t go as hard on them as you possibly could, and helped them the odd time in this kind of way. I don’t think you have to play your utmost best in every ranked game. It sounds like a grey area, but I think the distinction is reasonably clear. I think @yebellz captured some clear distinguishable features early on.

  • If you want to beat them to lower their rating, beat them to lower their rating. Probably a review would be helpful to them if that’s what their interested in, or other people would just prefer to play multiple games over and over again to learn by doing instead.

I think this is probably true, and I don’t know that there’s a universal concept of a teaching game. Some people might comment their ideas as the game processes, particularly in correspondence for example. I think because of the way Go is as a game, you can definitely give advice during the game and after a sequence has been played, as to how it could be played, without having too much impact on the rest of the game or the result.

So if you doing this kind of thing in a teaching game, I don’t see an issue. If you’re just playing a stronger player with no expectation of winning, and hoping for their help, possibly by agreement, I don’t really see a problem. They could review or comment etc in or after a rated game as long as they’re basically not playing for you, because otherwise the rated game doesn’t really make sense.

KGS has it’s own idea of a teaching game/mode KGS - Teaching (in English) where the teacher can pause and review the game, edit the board and so on and then continue. I think this is the kind of thing that doesn’t suit a ranked game also, and it’s better as unranked or a completely separate mode as mentioned there, with dedicated tools. Probably the equivalent in OGS currently would be to discuss and share variations to play out next, or toggle between a game page and a review page, or to undo bad mistakes and continue as per a discussion. Still makes more sense as an unranked game.

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I should clarify, given that I think the phrase teaching game is being used to mean very different things across this thread even. What I am specifically cringing at is the type of situation where a much stronger player simply mercilessly crushes a beginner, without offering any substantial advice, review, or encouragement, with the expectation that simply the experience of getting destroyed is enough of a lesson. Not everyone does this, of course, but it does happen a depressing amount, and I worry about the negative impact of such an approach in terms of driving new players away from the game.

Another sort of teaching style, which I think is particularly helpful when the skill gap is quite large and a new player is being introduced to the player, is to play a sort of game that is not really a contest, but an open discussion about possibilities and moves. Here, the teacher is not even trying to win, but just demonstrating on the board in order to find teaching situations. Such games would involve copious amounts of advice and feedback to the student as the game is unfolding, and the teacher would likely even try to throw the game to the student, and setup plenty of opportunities for the student to learn by not only playing merely “weaker” moves, but rather objectively and obviously (to the teacher) bad moves (such as leaving glaring vulnerabilities, refusing to kill vulnerable stones). My view is that these type of teaching games should not be ranked.

These are merely extreme examples, and there are all sorts of other situations that people might call “teaching games”, either in between these cases, or otherwise. For example, two players, both with at least intermediate experience, and perhaps a smaller, but still significant skill gap), might play a “teaching game” in the nominal sense that they just commit to review and analyze the game in detail afterwards, but otherwise play the game normally to best of their abilities (possibly with some degree of skill experimentation). In these sorts of “teaching games”, there’s probably no problem with having the game be ranked, as it should not involve any player trying to throw the game or intentionally playing far below their normal level of skill.

I should reassure that some sort of prohibition of trying different strategies or experimenting with different styles in ranked games is not at all what I mean when I mentioned “weaker moves” in my earlier post. I really mean the sort of nonsensically bad moves that aim to essentially throw the game back into a more even positions (or deliberately refuses to take advantage of clear opportunities, such as refusing to kill a student’s desperately weak groups).

I think that one severe problem with this is that it is difficult to say exactly when the teacher is clearly much stronger and should win the game. This can be especially unclear when considering a newer player without an established rank. I think you’ve ignored parts of my reasoning already stated above.

However, I think another sort of concern is about the philosophy of the teacher aiming to win teaching games, specifically in the context of helping beginners (which seems to be part of the original motivation of the thread).

Related to above discussion, here is a great blog post about the philosophy of teaching Go (especially in the sense of introducing new players to the game): How to Teach Go | BenGoZen

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I know one thing for sure: if you, as the teacher, have a good idea of the student’s level and you’re confident that you can still win even while playing teaching moves in the game, then the probability that the student would beat you in a normal non-handicap ranked game is insignificant, which means that as long as you win the game, the ranking system will receive the correct feedback and the student’s rank will receive the correct bump down (or as correct as the current system allows).

In practice, the rule “ranked teaching games are allowed only if the teacher is clearly much stronger and the teacher wins the game” also means “if you, the teacher, are not confident that you can win the game even while making it a teaching game, don’t make it ranked”, which is essentially what you want (well, I guess with the exception of the “teaching games” where two players of similar level just play a normal game and then review it after), though it’s what ArsenLapin doesn’t want.

For now, all of your more idealistic points just seem to point to “your preferred style of teaching game means you would make your teaching games unranked” – and I’m missing the argument supporting “therefore nobody else should be allowed to play ranked teaching games”.

As pointed out, ranked teaching games are already regularly happening on the site. It seems to me that, if anything, offering clearer guidelines as to when they should be avoided would only help your idealistic vision come closer to reality.

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Would you still want this even if there were mechanisms that satisfied you to get beginners onto their correct rank rapidly?

What if the proposal to allow an “initial rank” to be set was implemented?

Then would you want ranked teaching games?

Because if this is only about “let’s help beginners get the right rank”, then I still think it’s not the right tool for the job,

If it is for some other reason, I’ve missed that in the flow - what is it?

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Well, in my specific case, it’s because of that – I wouldn’t consider making teaching games ranked if I didn’t perceive that beginner newcomers have an unsatisfactory initial experience likely to push them away from Go for the wrong reasons.

But then again, this thread has brought up ArsenLapin’s and KoBa’s points of view, for example.

I have kept replying to this thread, mostly to ArsenLapin and yebellz, in a “socratic” way. I kinda reached my own answers a while ago, but I’m curious to thoroughly understand their points of view to find out if there’s a nugget of truth hidden underneath that we can all agree on.

I guess like it happened with Socrates, my replies tend to end up being inflammatory even though they’re mostly sharp, provocative, somewhat cheeky deconstructions of what I read, and I will eventually be silenced. But that’s just the nature of things :laughing:

Reflection that goes nowhere about ArsenLapin's points

AFAIU, ArsenLapin’s position seems to be that a game being ranked doesn’t take priority over making sure that the weaker player has a good learning experience from the game – which is understandable, and may also point to a flaw in the premises on which the ranking system itself is built, and it may or may not be making our ranking system significantly worse.

Asking the players to play what ArsenLapin seems to think of as “bad Go”, aka Go that is only focused on winning and not on the mutual learning benefit, just because the ranking system suffers otherwise, may fall under that “kafkaesque absurdity” I spoke about in an earlier reply: if it came down to a choice between not allowing players to play Go as they see fit and changing the ranking system, changing the ranking system should be the obvious conclusion.

Although I don’t feel like there’s any good solution to that, and perhaps all we can do is just throw our hands up and say “it is what it is, the ranking system will always be flawed because we can’t take that aspect into account”.*

Or maybe in the end it would be reasonable to ask players to take ranked games as seriously as they would a real life tournament game, and make things like Ladders unranked.

*oh, you know what, I just thought of a way to perhaps take that into account. It’s never going to happen, but it might be possible. :person_shrugging:

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I think part of the conflict in this thread stems from this sentiment, but not in the sense that the ranking system isn’t taken seriously enough; rather, it seems some take it too seriously and assign very idealistic qualities to how a ranking system should operate. Looking at your OGS profile, I can see how this may have come about – you have a surprisingly low volatility in your rank progression (a very smooth line seemingly indicating a “stable” rank and steady improvement). This is not at all the norm.

The problem is that any ranking system is inherently biased and inaccurate for any number of reasons, but one core inescapable truth is that there is no such thing as a “true” rank. People may have good and bad days, or they might encounter blind spots in their knowledge, or they could just get lucky. I’ve had my own rank drop and rise 3 points in the span of a few days, just because I happened to play “weaker” players whose particular style was unfamiliar to me. The purpose of ranking is more for matchmaking and a rough idea of the general strength differences between players, not some magically omniscient system that perfectly captures a player’s inherent strength (which doesn’t necessarily exist anyway).

Unfortunately, this just isn’t true, but my argument is that it doesn’t matter if the real purpose of the ranking is a snapshot for matchmaking. For example, say my rank is currently 5kyu and I think my rank is “stable” in that I’m not actively improving or regressing in my skill level (of course there’s no actual way of knowing this). It’s perfectly possible that I could play my allotted one ranked game a week, get paired with a 7kyu each time, and lose each time for any number of reasons. My rank would drop accordingly, as it should, but does it mean I got that much worse? Time will tell, but the most likely outcome is that I’ll play some ranked games against less unfamiliar styles in the future and win, balancing out my rank. This volatility is completely normal, but it does mean that playing a few ranked games for the purpose of “preserving” my “true” rank is actually counterproductive in many cases – ranking should get more accurate the more you play, not the less.

Why do I say all this? I think it adds a bit of context to my following points:

People don’t generally know that the move they play is the “best” move. In fact, AIs don’t actually know that either (yet), though they are a much better approximation of “perfect” play. I would argue that @ArsenLapin1 is not muddying the system at all, at least any more than the average player. When he (or anyone else) tries out a new move/style in a ranked game, he’s not “misrepresenting” his ability or messing with the ranking system. In fact, at his high rank, he’s still very likely to win against a lower ranked player even if he drastically alters his style, so the “expected” win should still occur (an argument very similar to yours for allowing ranked teaching games as long as the teacher wins…). People play moves without knowing that it’s the “best” move at their skill level all the time, and no one accuses them of introducing bias because they simply cannot know whether their move is the “proper” one for their skill level. Also, people should be allowed to try out new and unfamiliar moves – that’s one of the only ways to improve. People even do that in ranked, live tournaments.

Bringing this long-winded comment back to the original topic:

This is where the argument falls apart for me. It could be a very big deal. Someone could conceivably play a bunch of ranked teaching games against lower-ranked players, winning each time, and find their rank inflated slowly but surely to a very incorrect level. This is actually worse than just playing a bunch of normal ranked games against weaker players, because weaker players are much more likely to play teaching games than they are to repeatedly accept ranked games in which they get destroyed every time without the benefit of guided mentorship. This is of course an extreme case, but not actually that unlikely.

Given all of the above context, shouldn’t this also mean that ranked teaching games should not be allowed, even if the teacher wins, since it would inflate the teacher’s rank over time?

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