Endgame etiquette

I think your reading is correct here. Black’s stone at D2 is dead since it cannot manage to avoid capture, and Black should not be able to capture White, if White does not make any mistakes.

In principle, Black could continue playing, but it just prolongs the game and hopes for White to make a mistake.

If Black does not play another move in that area, White should not as well (if aiming to maximize the margin of victory under Japanese rules). If Black passes, White does not need to play more stones to prove that Black is dead. Instead, Japanese rules considers the hypothetical play out (without changing the final board position) to judge that the Black stone should be dead.

It actually gets very tricky (with tons of rare and weird edge cases) to determine life and death at the end of game under Japanese rules.

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… if you are a pedant about them that is :wink:

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Well, it does require an incredible amount of attention to detail and analysis to follow the Japanese rules precisely under various situations.

However, it is absolutely required if one wants to get some situations correct. Otherwise, one would not really be playing by the Japanese rules.

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The best thing to do:

  1. Just play as you think the rules are
  2. If there’s some weird endgame dispute, either report the game to a moderator or post it on the forum
  3. Yebellz will come save the day when the Japanese rules are weird
  4. In the worst cases, consult Robert Jasiek
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For in-person play, it can definitely be part of the etiquette in some places, even with Japanese rules, to fill out the dame at the end, as it makes manual counting a bit easier. This is obviously not an issue online when you have semi-automatic counting.

Yeah - I wonder if this is one of the contributors to online frustration when people feel the urge to needlessly fill the dame online, because it makes sense IRL.

I prefer filling dame, even online. Not because it makes sense IRL, but because it gives the game a richer and fuller sense of completeness.

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But Japanese rules require dame filling, just ask @yebellz

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… only vs a pedant…

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Even this pedant (myself) often does not fill in all of the dame when playing with Japanese rules on OGS. In most cases, my opponents indicate a laziness to fill out the remaining dame (by passing early), so I simply pass as well, and we score while assuming that the dame had been filled.

I’ve written about dame filling in other posts:

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Kind of resume:
Beyond the worries on etiquette, differences of rules, ability to see weaknesses…
To answer directly to the OP, play the dame in each of your games until being a strong SDK and have some mastery of the rules and endgame calculation. That’s how I see it.

About etiquette and dame, the one I know is it’s too late to resign in the dame. Please let’s count that finished game.

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Yeah, resignations during dame have a bit of a sour taste…

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, or until your opponent passes, and you can’t see a scoring reason to keep playing.

In general, the main reason to keep playing after your opponent passes is because your score will improve if you do. If you continue playing past the point where you have a plan to improve your score, you are wasting time and frustrating your opponent.

If you are yebellz and know some subtlety of how playing dame in a Japanese game will help your score, then by all means do so,. But don’t keep blindly playing stones in any circumstance after your opponent passes - they have indicated they think it’s time to finish, so any non-scoring play after that is frustrating timewasting.

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That’s included in “until…” The less experience you have the more you may miss some moves you have to add to consolidate your boundaries or even to stay alive and finishing the dame is providing help for this even if in theory when using the Japanese rules, the score will not change. And even more if I know that for some subtle reason the score may be different even under Japanese rules, the rarity is not a good argument to restrict myself to play them.

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If you take that approach and play “all the dame all the time”, even in Japanese, the are two things I’d observe:

1 you are within your rights to do that
2 you will drive many opponents nuts, especially in correspondence.

Knowing #2, personally it’s not something I’d be advising beginners to do.

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Conditional moves can speed it up a bit.
IRL-games often require to play out all the dames (no pun intended) to simplify the counting (that is done manually).

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That’s true. If you feel compelled to fill all the dame in correspondence, and are at least somewhat considerate of the potential frustration this causes, then using conditional moves can help mitigate that somewhat.

Right. IRL games also require that you sit in the same room, so you can simplify moving the stones. That doesn’t mean we have to do it online. If you said to me “I am willing to frustrate you by spending the time to fill the dame in this correspondence game, because I do that IRL”, I would find that odd.

Didn’t say that. Would find it odd too.
But since a lot of people only play go online (also before corona crisis) the situation might arise that when they enter a IRL game/tournament, they might not know how to count. And this has happened some circa 15 years ago at my club. Caused some hilarity. :grin:

For me after having played 20+ years of IRL go filling the dames (@bugcat :is that the plural of the go term dame?) is natural.
I hardly ever play correspondence anymore; even without filling the dames I find that just too long.

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OT plural question

I should wait for the authoritative answer but I’d say that dame is the same in singular or plural, like salmon and sheep. Mainly because Japanese doesn’t really have plural form as I understand it. And also because dame sounds fine but dames sounds odd and hard to know how to pronounce!

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I must be a bit dyslectic cause I read your name as teapowderedrobot :grin:

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