I’d say that White gave up his right to annulment by agreeing to resume play.
He can’t say that Black “forced him to capture a seki”.
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Well, Black was quite persistent about it, and the OGS system doesn’t really have a good method of two people disagreeing with scoring when they both keep marking each other’s stones as dead.
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If two people disagree, they should resume playing. Since White self ataried, White lost.
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I don’t understand your position. Why does White not have the right to pass his turn?
If Black thinks he can achieve something by playing, let him go first; elsewise the referee can be called.
Once you finish playing, you have to mark dead stones. If both players disagree, they have to resume playing.
I must be fundamentally misunderstanding your point, because I cannot process what you’re trying to convey.
Are you trying to tell me what if this position is on the board, one player can refuse to settle and bully the other into playing X?
That’s not Go.
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No, nobody can force anybody to move, but by being obstinate about the scoring phase, someone can prolong a game by just not accepting any score and repeatedly resuming games. There’s many reports like this where the player didn’t have much options other than resigning, wasting 30 minutes of their time passing and resuming the game, or playing a move that kills them.
Moreover, it seems from White’s report, that they were not aware that passing was a valid option, and that they felt obligated to move even though they knew it would be self-atari.
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Non-agreed resumption makes the issue Black’s fault, then.
If there’s a dispute and both players refuse to move then the game should be paused and a mod should be called.
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Furthermore, the dispute was about whether the Black stones were alive or not. In the play-out, which is hypothetical in Japanese rules, it turned out that the Black stones at the top right could not be killed, thus this showed that they should be marked as alive. The play-out did not prove that the White stones are dead, though, so the players still did not properly agree on the status of the White stones. Importantly White thinks the White group should be alive.
Sadly, there’s also no hypothetical playing on OGS.
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In that position, if both players pass and agree it’s a seki, no problem, the game is scored. OTOH, if they disagree on the status of the groups then they should continue playing. Say it’s White’s turn. If White thinks that after all it’s a seki, then White can pass. If White still disagrees and self-ataris, then White is dead and loses the game.
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No, this is not true under Japanese rules, and could produce incorrect results in some cases.
Under various area scoring rule sets, life and death disputes would be settled by playing on to capture all stones that are asserted to be dead. After that, any stones left uncaptured would be considered alive.
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This is wrong for Japanese rules. There are situations under Japanese rules, where stones are indeed dead, but continuing play to capture them would result in a wildly inferior result.
Here is an example:
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First let’s be clear what the correct result is: black is dead in lower right corner, so the top right corner is only a temporary seki and black is dead there too. In Japanese rules with hypothetical play white would demonstrate this by capturing the lower right to gain liberties, then atari at h8 is no longer self atari and capture top 2 stones as well, then rewind and score at this position without losing points. In Chinese/AGA rules white would similarly play out the capture, but not need to rewind as it doesn’t lose points if black is only passing whilst white does that.
If it was the black player via game chat pressuring the white player into resuming play, the correct response by white (assuming Japanese rules) should have been “I refuse to resume because I can only demonstrate their deadness without losing points via hypothetical play which is not implemented on OGS, here’s a link to the Japanese rules, and if you don’t believe me contact a moderator (who I hope understands the rules).” But people who aren’t rules experts can be forgiven for not knowing this. White made a silly mistake in the resumption, and given my lack of sympathy for a similar self atari in the heartbreak case you might think I would say that mistake should stand, but I would like to see the chat and “Moreover, it seems from White’s report, that they were not aware that passing was a valid option, and that they felt obligated to move even though they knew it would be self-atari.” muddies that. If black said anything incorrect per rules then I would say annul is valid. If the players were too dumb to realise the lower right was dead then it makes it harder.
Does calling a mod pause the clock against all shenanigans a troll could try?
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So it’s clear to me that both players were wrong, but white was more wrong, as shown by their self-atari.
Also, white was first claiming that black was dead in the upper right, but after the self-atari, he changed that claim to it being a seki!
So I see no reason to annull this game. When both players (wrongly) assumed black was alive in the lower right, it’s natural to conclude that the upper right is a seki and white disputing that claim was wrong.
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If analysis is enabled, one workaround is sharing and arguing over variations to demonstrate that something is dead.
However, a real stumbling block with the life and death resolution procedure under Japanese rules is that many people are not aware of the peculiar ko rules during this procedure. Specifically, taking back a ko is not allowed unless one passes while specifically declaring which ko one wishes to unlock. This has the effect of essentially nullifying ko threats.
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No, any player can unpause a game if they wish, and thus get their opponent to time out. Unless a moderator drops by to pause the game (but at that point things should be solvable).
Black was being adamant throughout that the stones were alive, and conversation was apparently via PM, to which we have no access. The report was that Black “Forces people to go in seki by spamming”
The issue I’m having is mostly with White’s group being dead in the hypothetical play-out, while White’s intention was to dispute the Black stones. The death / life of the White stones was never a disputed thing until after White made their hypothetical mistake. One could say that the play-out made clear why Black was ‘alive’ in the top right, but it did not make clear why White would be dead in the position where both players passed the first time.
Well, white wasn’t dead when they passed. White only killed himself in the resumption.
Because under Japanese rules the resumption is hypothetical.
The resumption is to settle disputes, and the White group being alive wasn’t disputed.
OGS doesn’t support that part of Japanese rules.
Exactly, so it’s hard to really pinpoint which ruleset should be used here.