Marking stones dead but not territory (within seki)

Support
1

Just finished a 9x9 game with 3 groups in seki which I win by 0.5 points: https://online-go.com/game/8574736 (Opponent hasn’t done scoring as I’m writing this, but I think the situation is fairly clear.)

The issue with scoring is that there is a stone at C5 which needs to be marked as dead but the point should not be marked as territory under Japanese rules because the group is in seki. I don’t seem to be able to do this. I can easily mark D5 as dame but only seem to be able to mark C5 as either an alive black stone or white territory.

I could of course resume the game and capture that stone, but I should be able to score the game correctly without doing that.

1 Like
2

Have you tried shift clicking?

3

Doesn’t seem to do anything different from a normal click. Should it?

4

Yeah, if I recall correctly, either clicking or shift clicking the point should toggle the status of the point. If it’s giving you trouble, I can adjudicate the game in your favor.

5

It does toggle, but it toggles between “alive black stone” and “dead black stone and white territory”, whereas I think it should be “dead black stone and dame”.

1 Like
6

And thanks for offer of adjudication, but I’ll try to agree with opponent first. Better that way.

7

You could also resume and capture the stone. Won’t change the score.

1 Like
8

If you think the OGS board as a real board and try to count the score without capturing the single stone then on a real board you actually agree that the single stone is part of the seki and “not dead” so you better capture the stone on a real board to get that one capture point. Same should apply for OGS board also.

9

It’s usually possible to just agree which stones are dead without needing to play out the extra stones to actually capture, which is often crucial for Japanese scoring. And I think it should be obvious that the single stone is not part of the seki. So, in a real game then no I would not normally want capture that stone during the main game, I would claim it is dead during scoring.

10

Hmm you are correct. I still find it weird that you would prefer to claim it after the game than eat it straight forward and be done with it :slight_smile:

11

It’s mostly habit of not playing out unneeded sequences, tbh. And this is actually a rather unusual situation; I can’t think of any other situation in which playing out the capture of already dead stones doesn’t lose points.

12

Doesn’t resolve the seki…

13

Right it won’t change the seki, but that’s not what the problem is. The problem is there is a single black stone that is dead. You have to figure how to tell the scoring tool it’s dead but the rest of it is a seki, or you can just capture the stone. IMO it’s much easier to always capture the stones that you can in a seki. It’s not just the scoring tool that gets confused, opponents can be confused too.

2 Likes