Im a beginner and am trying to get my friends into go, and we had this game. We have this group of stones(Top Left) where whoever places the next set of stones between them will lose his group to the other player.
So now we both want to pass, how do we resolve this situation?
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You both want to pass, so you both pass, and that area everyone lives, it’s called a seki.
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You found out a rare situation where a group (two groups actually) lives without having eyes.
It’s called “mutual life”: as you said, noone wants to move there first because it means being killed. So nobody does it and those stones stay there until the end.
In this case the two groups share two liberties.
There is a similar situation where each group has one eye and the two groups share just one liberty.
You can find more at Sensei’s library
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Thanks!
So then neither of us gets the points for those empty spots as theyre between our stones. And both groups are “alive”.
Honestly in trying to understand this i stumbled onto the fact that there are other rules than the wikipedia 10 ones, like chinese ones where the stones placed actually count as a point and they seem simpler at first glance somrhow.
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Yes. This scoring method is known as area scoring. Living stones are points, while dead/captured stones are not.
Note that this will lead to the same result (score difference) when both players played the same number of stones during the game (barring some special cases like seki with an unbalanced number of false eyes). For the vast majority of games the scoring method (area scoring vs territory scoring) doesn’t affect who is the winner.
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