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. 
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 
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On one hand I entirely agree. OTOH I have seen so many beginner games where players passed simply because the opponent has passed while the borders were wide open still. So I fear this is bad advice for many beginners, because they often somehow (and incorrectly) assume their opponent knows better and they ‘don’t want to waste time’. In the end that leads to some random score assigned to the game and neither side gaining any understanding about how a game of go ends.
There is no easy solution of course unless there is a stronger player around who can explain the situation to the beginners. All I’m saying is I wouldn’t emphasize the ‘don’t waste time’ too much when talking to beginners. (And that sometimes goes up to about 17k (in current rating system) or so in my experience.)
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I wonder why it would seem easier to say to beginners “play till the dame is full” than “play till the territories are sealed”?
I think the latter is the important message…
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Beginners can’t always recognise dame. Hell Gosh darn it, sometimes I can’t recognise dame.
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Right - that’s my point I guess. The previous proposition was (IIUC) that it’s easiest to tell beginners to play till the dame is full before passing even if your opponent passes - by implication because that’s easiest.
I would prefer if we told beginners to play until the territories are sealed and then your opponent passes, because that’s easiest and least potentially frustrating to the opponent.
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Actually, for beginners, I think it’s a good idea to encourage that they fill in dame, for the sake of understanding some potential complications that can arise. Often there will exist consequential dame that do affect the score (by requiring a reinforcing move). I think that beginners should not be told to take shortcuts, since then it might prevent them from learning some endgame intricacies. Hence, stronger players should also show some patience when dealing with a beginner or weaker player, since their opponent might not see all of the implications or understand that some things are settled, and anyways, the practice of playing some things out might offer a learning opportunity.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, I believe professional players routinely fill in the dame when playing out a game to the scoring phase. It’s really just the intermediate players in between that routinely skip dame filling in casual games, but taking such shortcuts requires a level of mutual understanding and agreement.
Here’s a simple example of a dame that “matters”.
Of course, White could fill A to force Black to defend at B, or maybe Black would preemptively fill at B (usually when there’s nothing else better to do) before A is filled. Yet, often people playing on OGS might leave both A and B unfilled, and instead pass, since OGS (and other servers) have a scoring feature to mark both A and B as “dame” (or neutral) that do not count for points. While all of this is obvious to intermediate level players, a beginner might not realize all of this. Some might leave both A and B unfilled, but then not realize that B should be marked as “dame” during scoring. Other beginners, playing as Black, might make the mistake of filling the dame at A first, or neglect to defend at B when White fills at A. Potentially making these types of mistakes (or at least presenting the opportunity to think about them) might be good learning opportunities for some beginners.
Here’s another similar example:
Here, a beginner might overlook that C is a crucial dame that both players should eventually (when there are no bigger moves left) want to play first, since one point (and possibly even the game) hangs in the balance. On a side note, an interesting quirk of the Japanese rules is that if both players passed while leaving the dame B and C unfilled, and the game was close enough (decided by a half-point margin that would flip depending on who gets to fill C first), then both players would lose!
Another type of dame filling learning opportunity can occur if the situation from the previous diagram appears in one part of the board, while the situation depicted below appears in another part, and imagine that the rest of the board is completely settled with no other remaining dame.
Here, if it was White’s turn to move, it would be important for them to not pass and to recognize that D should be played first (requiring a response from Black at E), which then lets them fill C as well (eventually requiring another response from black at B). Of course, White playing at C first would be a mistake, since that allows Black to then play at D, and ultimately allows Black to save a point (which could even cost the game).
All of these implications are of course obvious to intermediate players, but I think it’s valuable for beginners to have the opportunity to play out these type of situations in order to learn.
Some dame might have to be filled to ensure that scoring is properly done on OGS
Here are some other interesting dame filling examples to illustrate some potential limitations in the scoring phase to indicate dead stones and null territory.
I had a situation like this in one of my games.
I think it might be possible for both players to take a shortcut by passing in this situation, but then both of the marked White stones would need to be marked as dead, while 2 and 4 should be marked as “dame” (non-territory) for Black. In this case, the position of the dead (marked with X) White stones would also count as two points of territory.
However, consider another situation:
Here, I think taking a shortcut of passing might not work, since one would have to mark 2 as non-territory, X as dead (for counting as a prisoner for Black), but then the space under X as also non-territory for Black (since Black needs to connect there). I think that it might not be possible to mark the board in such a fashion on OGS during scoring.
However, in both of these two cases, a simple work-around to ensure that scoring is properly done is to play out the dame filling, in order to compel black to capture (and connect, in the latter case).
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Wow thanks to take time for giving examples.
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dames (is that the plural of the go term dame?)
dames is an Anglicised plural, which is fine since we’re speaking English.
dame follows Japanese non-pluralisation, which is fine since dame is a Japanese loanword.
There’s no reason to say one style is better than the other.
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Everyone’s talking about filling dame here, but OP was asking about etiquette of defending a cut:
I’m almost certain the marked stone is dead and white’s territory is safe. But with plenty of points to spare, I might reinforce it just in case or to head off pointless invasions. Either way I can’t imagine anyone getting annoyed by one or two extra reinforcement stones that are costing you points.
When my opponent reinforces something I thought was secure, it makes me wonder whether I missed a good opportunity to attack. Here’s a similar position I encountered recently where I didn’t miss it and Black really should have reinforced earlier:
(Or was it actually safe? I don’t know.)
And apparently even the pros fail to reinforce critical points sometimes:
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I think White should play A immediately, asking for A–D with the capture of the top-side stone.
If A, C then White O becomes a serious question.
It looks to me that an immediate O, B ruins the aji because then Black has E in response to A, and it’s not clear that A is still going to work.
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Black will not hane since that instantly collapses.
If White O (without A–B), Black B and how does White proceed?
That’s not true.
If A, C, O and Black hanes beneath B (we’ll call that point H, for “hane”) then White makes the lethal atari at B and the five-stone dango can’t escape.