Hi everyone
I’m teaching myself Go, and I keep running into the same problem: how do you count territory after an OTB game? 
I can understand my own kifu when I replay them, but I often miscount the territory. On the other hand, when I look at professional game records, I honestly can’t tell which areas belong to Black or White at all.
Any tips on how to practice and get more accurate at this? Or is this just one of those things that only clicks after a lot of games?
Thanks a lot!
If you want to learn to count space, my recommendation is to go to a club and get something strong that won’t beat you without death and will help you learn to count correctly at the end of a game.
I guess it may be good to take a step back and ask - how comfortable do you feel making the distinction between a living group and a weak or already dead group?
This can take a long time to learn how to see correctly, and yes - as you mentioned - professional games can be very difficult to interpret because - if they leave the position un-settled, and one side resigns - it can take a bit of reading to figure out who would have won the capturing race in that area.
So yeah, a good place to start might be
This is a video from a company that teaches players of all levels in Go.
If you want to estimate the points during the game, here are 2 advices
1: count 2 by 2: it works better as 1 by 1. A stone prisoner is 2 points in the Japanese counting (recommended for estimation). Don’t forget prisoners and komi.
2: count the points each player is fully sure to have only. ,This because the remaining points will be shared around 50-50 between the players. A better estimate needs to anticipate the right order of endgame moves, which is ofc hard and not so necessary for DDK players.
For example here
Black has a 10 points territory.
During a game there are 2 balances to check from time to time: the balance of territories and the balance of power.
If you have less territories then you should hope to have more power: that means you have better future with better attack possibilities and you may be able to get a better balance of territories with your next moves using your better power.
If you have more territories you should have less power so you can play more solid, conservative to keep the lead and eventually bring some more power back.
Book: attack and defense.
Correct! You found 9 dead white stones. Similarly there are 7 dead black stones:
So there are for the moment 9 points for Black and 7 points for White. Now imagine that all dead stones have been removed:
You have to add points of territory. Can you see the four black territories?
For instance there are 8 points of territory for Black on the top right.
How many points of territory can you count on each of the other territories (top left, bottom right, bottom left)?
For black, the top left has 10 points, the bottom right has 15 points and the bottom left to the middle has 16 points
Correct! So Black has 8+10+15+16=49 points of territory. Add the 9 white prisoners, you get 58 points for Black.
Now there is a missing information: I didn’t say what is the komi and how many stones were captured previously. Let’s say that
and that players are using Japanese rules with 6.5 komi.
Then Black has 49 territory + (9+41) prisoners = 99 points.
Do the same for White, add 6.5 points for White and you’ll see who is winning.
Thanks for your advice and resource. I never thought about these questions. It’s hard for me to identify seki lol
White has 13+7+25+2=47 points as it’s territory
so the total points are 47+41+6.5=94.5 points
Black has 99 points, black win… right?
You forgot the 7 prisoners (the 7 dead black stones that were removed after the game). So White won the game.
Oh! I see.
WOW, I never thought of practice it step by step like this! Thanks a lot for your help☺️
Thanks for your advice and reference. I checked this book, I saw many people recommend it. seems pretty great!
Another good way to practice this kind of skill-building is to look for high-ranked players on the OBSERVE GAMES page on OGS, then click through to their profile, and find a game they won or lost via resignation (i.e. it didn’t go to counting)
Then open up that game, and - without clicking the Score Estimator button - try to figure out which groups are alive, and which are dead.
Here’s an example from a game between a 6 dan and a 1 dan
Here, Black played the last move before White resigned.
I would encourage you to go into the game, go into Analysis Mode, and try some responses from White to determine which stones can be saved and which are dead. Was White correct to resign? Could White have turned this around?
Once you try a few variations, feel free to hit the Score Estimator, and see if it agrees with your assessment.
OTB, as long as you keep the shapes of territories we can move the stones, to try to get territories with empty rectangular shapes. Even better if they are each 10 points. Then it’s easier to count and check the total (like 5 territories of 10, and 3 more for a total of 53).
With Chinese rules it’s even easier because you can add or remove stones at will (but you have more to count). With Japanese rules it’s possible if you remove (or add) the same quantity of stones for both colors.
Following up on this…
If someone plays inside the territory of the other player, does this change the score? It probably doesn’t but It seems like it would, the territory would shrink due to the additional stones, and the additional stones would outnumber the number of captured stones.
Only if they can make a living group.
If someone plays inside an opponent’s enclosure and fails to make a group with at least 2 eyes to live, all their stones will get captured, and the net effect on the score will be the same or worse than before.
I think their confusion came from the common beginner’s misconception that they can force their opponents to completely captured the throw-in stones during the game (instead of consensus about dead stones after the game).
