You can also choose “custom” for the komi when setting up a challenge, and manually change it to 0 ^____^
I often do that when playing casual games with friends, since i like the idea of ending games as draws xD
Oh right, thats pretty much people did before they started using komi! For serious games, people often held some absurdly long best-of-ten series, where they alternated colours from game to game and nullified blacks first-move-advantage that way ^^
I think what OP is really saying is that they found a way to even the odds without komi. Changing komi to 0 puts white at a disadvantage.
I’d like to try this! It’s usually such a waste to win by a lot of points because in the end it’s just a binary win/loss. This type of variation could encourage keeping both players engaged until the end. Or at least until the end of the first game
so i start off as black and we play … switch, now i’m white
Personally, I’d be more interested in parallel games rather than serial. Then resignation is a little easier to evaluate.
Lets say Player A is black in game 1 and white in game 2. He could wait for Player B to make a move in game 2 and copy that move to game 1. Once Player B responds in game 2, Player A can copy that move in game 2. Now on both boards 1 move has been made by each colour and the situation is identic. Rinse and repeat and you have two identical games.
Works, as long as Player B doesn’t want to play along and starts stalling herself or until Player A wants to diverge, because he things he found a better move than the one from Player B.
You probably have to play sequentially because of that.
I kind of like the idea; essentially if you start as black, where you have a slight advantage due to having the first move without Komi, and depending on how high you win, you “earn” your Komi for the second game.
As Metagross31 said, I’m thinking as long as one player can wait for the other player to first make the next move on one of the boards, then they can mirror this move on the other.
It would also be an even game without komi if it’s just two board and for every move you can decide on which board to play, which would also be cool, because it’s just a different board geometry. There just has to be something that prevents mirror strategy, but I think that players can in good faith just agree to not mirror.
One way to prevent mirroring is to play on two boards of different sizes, like here:
I don’t think that fair komi for this setup is necessarily 0, but maybe it’s closer to zero than on the regular board? (The same could be said for the union of two boards of the same size, even though fair komi is 0 with mirroring, once you enforce that white is not allowed to mirror I would expect that black still has a small advantage!)
Sorry, we strayed a bit off-topic perhaps The problem with mirror play I was referring to was in the variant that @UrbanSpirit mentioned above, where on each move you can choose freely which of the two boards you want to play on. There white can always choose to play on the board that black did not play on. The first 6 moves could look like this:
In this variant, mirroring will always work for white, so it’s a bigger problem than in regular go (where there are strategies black can use to break the mirror).
But this was off-topic from what you suggested, which was playing two separate games in parallell.
I do not see any problems with mirror play with the move sequence you suggest here, I think that would work well!