I just want to explain a bit about why AGA rules have these “crazy passing rules”.
The AGA rules use Area Scoring, while the Japanese rules use Territory Scoring.
- Under Territory Scoring, each player’s score is their territory plus their opponent’s dead stones.
- Equivalently for Territory Scoring, each player’s score is their territory minus their own dead stones.
- Under Area Scoring, each player’s score is their territory plus their own living stones.
Even though the score is counted in different ways, the difference between area vs territory scoring does not significantly alter the strategy of the game. For the vast majority of games, the result will be the same, and maybe differ by only one point at most. In determining the result, all that matters is the difference between the two player’s scores. When the players have both played and passed an equal number of times, the area and territory scores will be identical.
The AGA rules use the concept of “pass stones” and “white plays last” simply for counting convenience, in order to make the territory counting yield the area score. If one directly counts the area score (territory plus living stones), the “pass stones” and “white plays last” conventions are unnecessary. However, these conventions exist since some people find it more convenient to count prisoners (or fill in territory with prisoners) rather than count the living stones.
Some advocate for teaching only under the Japanese rules for beginners, however, I think there is a lot of benefit to teaching both the concepts of area scoring and territory scoring, and to recognize how they give nearly equivalent results. This allows one to see the objective of the game from different perspectives, which may be beneficial for beginners learning and understanding strategy, and I’ve discussed this previously here:
I could go on further about how area scoring also simplifies the more complicated aspect of scoring, which is determining life and death at the end of the game, in comparison to Japanese rules, which has tons of minutia and technicalities that are confusing for even very experienced players.
However, I should stop, since I don’t want to derail this thread even more with rules pedantry.
