First move etiquette

I’m not talking about opponent who always starts in opposite corner as white
I’m talking about

Who are all these always-plays-the-same players? :smile:

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me

Ok I accept that

Does this exist?

Are you the exception that proves the rule?

I’m quite confused by this as well. The board is symmetrical :sweat_smile:

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When I create new strategy, I create simple algorithm for first 4 stones and always follow it. Opponent can do experiments on me to figure out the algorithm. If they do it, they will be able to invent countermeasure that is more efficient than anything that Katabot will tell them.
My algorithm is not necessarily symmetrical. Therefore it makes difference in which corner my black opponent will place the first stone.

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What I mean: players are part of the board. Even if both users are normal and don’t use strange strategy, human psychology is complicated. Winrate may be different depending on in which corner the first move is played.

Someone may do the research by using random generator to choose the corner for first move as black. Then its logical to start always playing in corner with the biggest winrate even if that corner is not top right.

Existence of top right corner etiquette only creates unnecessary negative towards such researchers. In order to protect them it would be better if that tradition would stop to exist.

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The tradition impacts the psychology. If one needs to modify the tradition to do the research, then the results become less interesting (almost pointless)

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If tradition somehow would disappear, its always possible to do 2nd research.
Its still possible to research current situation while ignoring cancelled games.

Result may be different for everyone, you may play better in top left corner, while someone else in bottom right. So doing research yourself is more useful than using result of someone else.

The asymmetric tradition (of opening in the polite triangle) is a part of human psychology. So, if the point of such research is to investigate how these symmetric situations may have different affects upon potentially asymmetric human player thought processes, then it seems quite tricky (perhaps even ill-posed) to even imagine the counter-factual situation where this tradition does not exist. For example, in over-the-board play among experienced human players that are well versed in this etiquette and tradition, playing the first move outside of the polite triangle may be viewed as quite rude, and doing so would be sending a message that affects the mentality of the players. If we imagine a world where this tradition does not exist (and Black choose the first corner randomly), then I think we must also imagine that the psychological affects of playing outside of the polite triangle do not exist. Thus, we’d be imagining a world possibly different than our own.

In our world, many players may still aim to handle game situations symmetrically, even if the fuseki situation gets flipped / rotated from what they are typically used to (due to opening outside of the polite triangle). However, despite this intention, possibly their pattern matching ability and fuseki understanding will be affected by playing a mirrored / rotated orientation. This is possibly a psychological aspect to consider when research the human aspects of breaking from this etiquette. However, if we are imagining a world where this etiquette never existed, then should we not also imagine that such hypothetical humans would be more familiar with playing rotated / mirrored fuseki, which would further alter the psychological aspects of this situation.

Another hypothetical possibility to consider is that we take our current world and imagine that all of a sudden players abandon this etiquette and simply start playing the first move in a randomly chosen corner. One way to imagine implementing this is if the Go server randomly flipped and rotated the board after the first move. This allows Black to play the move however they want, but still get uniformly random utilization of each “triangle”, and the players would understand that the placement is not a specific act of breaking from etiquette, but a mechanism enforced by the system.

Under such conditions, I suppose one could study the psychological affects that @triangle_fuseki seems to be interested in. However, I would question what exactly we’d be studying. Would we really be examining some fundamental human psychological bias about board position orientation? Do players read more accurately when the position is closer to them (in over-the-board play)? Perhaps, a significant confounding affect would be player’s varying levels of familiarity with dealing with fuseki patterns across different orientations.

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Hmmm, also rather important: last move etiquette.

I’ll say that while teaching or as a judge in tournaments, often the viewpoints are neither from black nor white, but often from the side or at an angle. So, players can definitely get used to different orientations and even a skewed board ratio (goban is usually not a square), and mentally reorientate the board. Making the impact of either orientation very limited I’d say. (can’t say it would still be the same if the board position is mirrored though)

The fact is we shouldn’t even talk about first move etiquette for online go because it should be very easy to rotate the game and put it where we want it to be for ourself only.

The question is more why our interface is so primitive.

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On pandanet IGS, the client software does allow players to rotate the board.

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There is no first move that I personally consider impolite.

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