Geoff Kaniuk's referee exercises

I don’t think that Japanese-like territory rules really punish trolls either. In order to perceive it as a punishment, we would have to assume that trolls care about the difference between losing by X points and losing by more than X points. Often, I think that some trolls will gladly worsen their own score in order to waste the time of their opponent (or maybe even hope that their victim times out or abandons the game). Further, there are often time wasting moves (like playing needless ko threats) that do not reduce one’s own score. Hence, I don’t think this aspect of territory scoring has such a large impact on discouraging trolling. On the other hand, I think the complexity of resolving life and death disputes under the official Japanese rules (and similar territory scoring) systems introduces considerably more opportunities for trolling and abuse, even in the form of a player exploiting a novice by confusing them about the correct procedure.

Depending on how exactly one implements pass stones during resumption, one might inadvertently introduce this into a territory scoring system as well. There could be some situations that you might not want, such as: 1) dame being worth points in the resumption, and 2) pass fights may be possible.

Let’s the say the players are actually tied in territory score, but they have left an odd number of (inconsequential) dame empty before they both pass. Then, if one player disputes the life/death status and they resume play with pass stones, the player that goes first should be able to win by taking more dame (and giving one fewer pass stone), if you keep the provision that both players need to play an equal number of times after resumption. This would effectively make the dame worth points, so to prevent this, both players need to fill the dame before first passing (and possibly resolving life and death disputes in a potential resumption).

If you drop the provision that both players need to play an equal number of times in the resumption, then I think pass fights may become possible.

The reasoning behind a komi of 7.5 is that it jumped up by 2 from the previously commonly-used value of 5.5. Since the area scoring margin is most often odd, and a komi of 6.5 is unlikely to behave substantially differently than 5.5. However, whether or not the komi is too large or small is a separate and resolvable issue.

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