Komi 5.5? and why no nigiri?

The second round of 9x9 Honinbo has started, which is great.

It says now under the player’s name and in the game information that the komi is 5.5. Is this intentional or should it be 6.5 as before (and as the pros in Japan use it)? I prefer 6.5. On the other hand, the bug/feature of the stronger player always getting white in tournaments should be changed to a nigiri. That way, the weaker players don’t have to play against a seemingly big komi all the time.

http://senseis.xmp.net/?HandicapForSmallerBoardSizes

We use the old japanese recommendation for handicaps and komi, which is 5.5 for an even 9x9 game

Is it possible to return 6.5 for Chinese or AGA rules (so for different types we have different komi)? Seems like 5.5 gives bigger chance for black to win… http://senseis.xmp.net/?Komi

Hm that is interesting and does seem to support going to 6.5, though the next question would be do we need to raise other komi adjustments as well (ie, is 3.5 also to low for a 1 rank difference in 9x9? etc…)

For chinese rules, it should be 5.5 or 7.5. 6.5 doesn’t make much sense as the score is almost always odd. I hope you didn’t revert to 5.5 in 19x19 games (Japanese rules), though this would only be consistent with the new 9x9-komi.

What about the nogiri question? Is it a feature or a bug that the stronger player always gets white in tournaments? I don’t like it and it doesn’t make sense to me. But if it is a feature I rather get used to it.

19x19 is unchanged, we use the komi that is stated in the rules for all of those, for 9x9 and 13x13 there were no specific recommendations that we saw that were dependent on rule sets so we just used the japanese recommendations across the board.

And yeah I think you’re right, it should be nigiri, i’ll look into it.