General questions

I wish go had a larger community, is ogs the smallest playerbase of all the sites? I havent bothered with other places because they require downloading

There is one :stuck_out_tongue:

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There is a fairly strong shogi player from the Netherlands: Arend van Oosten.

He is 4d in shogi, which may be comparable with 7d EGF in go (about the boundary between amateur and professional). He was European Champion Shogi in 1996.
He is a 2d go player and apparently he is quite a strong chess player as well: http://oudzuylenutrecht.nl/arend-van-oosten/ (sorry, it is in Dutch). In the article it says he drawed against the only Dutch World Champion in chess Max Euwe in 1976.

Here you can see a Dutch video of him playing in a tournament in the EGCC 10-15 years ago http://www.leergo.nl/video/Introductie.mp4 (around time stamp 30s, I also happen to appear in that video around the same time).

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Hi, I have a basic question, did some reasearch about it but did not find anything relevant answering my question, so here it is.
I used to play with ELO test bot from OGS servers, and at the end of each game it displays a sort-of ranking of my strength stated as:
ā€œELO update: 518 (+24), rank 8.8kyo, or OGS 30.0kyoā€.
Now I do not really get, what do these terms mean?
First of all, what is kyo? I know that ā€œkyuā€ is a ranking number going from 30k weakest to 0k strongest and from there itā€™s measured in dans from 1 to 9, but kyo? Never heard of ā€œkyoā€ nor could I find any site mentioning or explaning it as a ranking measurement of some sort.
Secondly, what is the difference between those two kyo-s? the 8.8 kyo and the OGS 30.0 kyo?
Thanks in advance,

Probably just a typo.

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is ogs the smallest playerbase of all the sites?

The Color Go Server (CGS) and Variant Go Server (VGS) are both smaller, but arguably neither of those sites aim to provide ā€œstandard Goā€.

Iā€™m pretty sure the Dragon Go Server (DGS) is also smaller, but that is a correspondence-only server.

Also Fly or Die. I imagine that since CGS includes a Fly or Die emulation colour scheme, Fly or Die itself is probably dying off. Of course, Fly or Die is also not exactly a ā€œstandard Goā€ server.

OGS might be bigger than GoQuest, but GoQuest pretty much only offers 9x9 blitz.

We could also consider sites like BoardGameArena and littleGolem, but they offer Go as just one of many other supported games.

So, Iā€™d say ā€œOGS perhaps has the smallest playerbase of ā€˜standard Goā€™ serversā€, ie. those ones that are dedicated to Go, offer 19x19 games, do not focus on variants, and donā€™t offer high-computation graphics.

People often say that KGS is declining, but whether they actually have a smaller playerbase than OGS at this point I have no idea.

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Clossius was speaking on stream last night about his dream of unifying OGS with KGS and CGS, and so creating a single Western online playerbase.

I think I remember him proposing that CGS and / or KGS could offer to integrate their UIs with OGSā€™ backend, so that a player could use the CGS or KGS interface to look for games on OGS, with the games themselves being played here. CGS and KGS would have the option of functioning secondarily as ā€œOGS clientsā€, without having to shut down their own server mechanics.

I can definitely see CGS being interested in this at some point, especially because theyā€™ve never had a very big playerbase. I expect KGS to simply fade away, though.

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Will games between servers be unranked?

Oh, there was also a small server with integrated facetime, that was popular on Twitch last year.

Perhaps it died ā€“ I donā€™t see it around any more. I never learnt its name.

IDK, I donā€™t think anyone had that clear a vision.

BTW, I already talked somewhere that its easy to create game where player of one server plays with player of another server. All you need is bot account - which instead of playing bot moves, plays moves of human from other server. So anyone can create this even without permission from admins.

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ā€œBotā€ account can play hundreds of games at the same time and automatically matchmaking players with similar ranks. So no additional interface is needed to be created in order to create bridge between servers.

One link between others

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