Maybe I’m just dumb, but I couldn’t find a way to get from a forum user to their game-playing server user to find out their rank, or any rank field on the forum user. Is this a conscious design decision to avoid rank-ism or just a missing feature? Sure it doesn’t matter what your rank is when discussing non-Go things, but when someones says “you should play this move” it would be helpful to know if that’s the opinion of a 26 kyu or a 6 dan to know how much weight to give it.
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I’m definetely not the most qualified to answer this question, but as I understand it, OGS and OGS forum are two separate systems. Specifically accounts on OGS are not linked to accounts on the forums. People can certainly add information about their OGS rank to their OGS forum profile, but having the site do so automatically may be technically impossible.
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I also don’t know if it’s possible to link ranks or if it was a conscious decision.
You can just open the main site in another tab and search for the user. It does get trickier of course to find a user if there’s some symbols like emojis or spaces in the persons username.
In any case one could just judge the move rather than the player when reading comments. If a 20kyu says you should play this move, maybe they’re saying it from their own game experience or maybe they’re relaying something they read in books or heard from a pro lecture etc, who knows. I don’t think it should necessarily be dismissed just because they might be a lower rank.
Similarly if a 3d or 6d says to play a move or sequence or “never play this move” I don’t think I should take that as gospel just because their rank is higher than me. Actually I tend to not trust advice when people are too certain when a move is “always bad” or “always good”. I feel compelled to scrutinise what they’re saying.
I will admit I do also think of ranks when I read advice and sequences, but whether that’s something we would want to encourage by display next to the persons comments in forums I’m not sure.
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When someone tells me “you should play this move”,
- Either I see that the proposed move is good;
- Or I have doubts and I can ask “why?”
The rank is not very relevant. If the 6d says to play a move that I don’t understand, then I can’t use their advice.
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I’m not saying any comment with a rank from a stronger player is better than all comments from a weaker or no rank player, but all else being equal it is more likely to be good advice and accurate. How about the following statements, all plausible, all about the same move which for sake of argument was bad for the reasons the 6d gave, as confirmed with super-human AI:
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Move X was bad. No rank
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Move X was bad. 10k
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Move X was bad. 6d.
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Move X was bad, you should play Y. No rank.
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Move X was good. No rank.
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Move X was good. 10k.
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Move X was bad, you should play Y, 10k.
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Move X was bad, you should play Y, 6d.
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Move X was good because you got more territory. 10k.
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Move X was bad because white’s outside influence was more valuable than the extra territory you got. 10k (I think this one is quite unlikely for a 10k to say).
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Move X was bad because white’s outside influence was more valuable than the extra territory you got. 6d.
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Move X was good because you got more territory, it’s 8 more points and a-b-c-d is your endgame privilege for 4 more points so that’s 12 points in total, here’s a link to a sensei’s library page about miai counting. Blah blah more words that seem useful but are actually wrong given the position. 10k.
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Move X was bad because white’s outside influence is more valuable and I’m a 6d so you should just believe me and I can’t be bothered to write more. 6d
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Move X was bad because white’s outside influence is more valuable, here’s some diagrams of 50 move long variations to show how that influence could come in useful in a future fight spreading out from the other side of the board, because that influence means you can invade more deeply in their moyo over there. 6d
Number 14 is possibly the most useful and accurate, but it could also be information overload and is lots of effort for the poster. I would say point 11 is more valuable than point 12, even though it’s less wordy/explainy, it’s more accurate and with the rank attached you can know to trust it more. Or points 3 is more valuable than point 6 or 9.
Points 11 and 12 are both useless because I don’t know how to count influence in general.
Anyway if the 10k ignores influence in their comment, probably someone else will jump in and correct their incomplete / wrong advice.
P.S. When I said 11 is useless, I exaggerated a bit. It can be useful to a player who didn’t think about the balance between territory and influence. But it is useless to a player who misevaluated that balance and still doesn’t understand after the comment where the misevaluation comes from.
It’s not a problem that arises often, and that’s why it’s not something requested. And probably why it never happened. It’s too easy to look up the profile on main site. And a lot of people here know each other anyway.
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I don’t disagree with Uberdude, but I’d like to add to the conversation, that go playing skills are not equal to go reviewing skills (although maybe correlated).
As an extreme case example take the automated AI review. It’s sequences are supposedly stronger than any human review, but in many cases its suggestion is too sophisticated (read: complicated) to be useful.
Perhaps a feature could be added where forum visitors can specify a rank if they want to, like the “flair” on Reddit:
In fact the trigger for me making this post was not for these kinds of review comments from unknown strengths, but in the AGA city league cheating thread I noticed a few comments from usernames I know to be dan players who were generally more sympathetic to Remi and thinking cheating likely, whilst the majority of comments seemed more focused on the public accusation whinge angle, so I wondered about the ranks of those people but couldn’t find it. To a DDK a 1k normal game, a 1k playing the game of his life, and a 7d might be hard to distinguish as all far above them, whereas for a mid dan they look different as lower, about the same, and above their own level respectively.
Surely it is more useful than a comment from a weaker player with the same mistaken judgement as you who reinforces your mistaken thinking. Yes it could be even more useful if that stronger player sat down with you for an in depth teaching session to examine the roots of your mistaken thinking, showed some illustrative variations with you asking questions along the way, found some other examples from your games, gave you a curated set of problems to work on etc etc but that’s a huge ask (these are the skills which make a good human teacher still valuable in the age of AI). I appreciate when a stronger players tells me where my judgement is wrong even if they don’t go into details as it’s a starting point for self study/discovery/improvement.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. “ – Mark Twain
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So I am not the only one trying to see if there is a pattern of opinions based on their ranks? lol
Kyu players want to believe they can crush 6 dans in a tournament. Dan players know it’s impossible.
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no need to be serious, maybe we are all created and controlled by AI anyway 
It’s not impossible to win against 6d. I’ve done it several times myself. But the outline of those games is usually that I get dominated for most of the game and then they blunder.
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I said “crush” 6 dans (in the sense of dominating the whole game), and was talking about kyu players.
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Shall we go back to revitalize that old thread? 
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Yeah, it’s not impossible, just very rare for a 1k to beat a 6d. For that to happen probably the 6d didn’t play very well (like hungover or some other excuse) and/or there was some big high stakes fight where the stronger player blundered and it was so big swing they held on to the end. But this game wasn’t like that, Remi played well, just black played so much better. It was a steamroller with just 1 blip; black simply played better shapes, better direction, sharp tenukis which surprised and impressed me (and checking with AI they were indeed better than my instincts), taking little time.
I’m well aware of the ability of lower ranked players to pull upsets: I did so in one of the best games of my go career right here on OGS when I, then EGF 3d, beat Alexander Dinerstein 3p EGF 7d in an even correspondence game. Thankfully that was pre-strong-AI so I didn’t have to defend myself against allegations of cheating, it’s a real shame that AI will make such suspicions almost inevitable in such upsets nowadays. So I’d really like to be able to celebrate and congratulate Tong on his win over Remi, but the nature and circumstances of it mean that’s not possible.
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… Hmmm …
Do you have a record of this match? Would be a nice comparison to see the AI graph of that game. 
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