Yep, exactly. It’s fun to one game face a aggressive player, the next one fight a more defensive one, then deal with irregular opening and so on…
It help develop a more balanced and adaptative playstyle. As there is different way to deal with the different approaches.
That why I stopped playing on tygem, every opposant feel exactly the same or almost. For example, once I had like 10 different opposant in a row answer with the same “kick-pincer” move to a standard 4-4 approaches. I have no clue why it is so popular there this is not a good variation -_-
It is entertaining for a while, you get to see all kind of weird attack and trick joseki and so on. I think it is good for a player development to go there and experience it, learn how to punish it. But after a while it just get boring.
Several years ago, someone published here a chart of win ratios using aggregated OGS data. IIRC, it showed that White was slightly favored in some rank ranges within the kyu levels (I don’t remember the details). Perhaps those players saw that chart. It is also possible that some players prefer to be reactive due to their personality.
I’ve done this in 9x9 game offers unintentionally for a time when the settings seemed to have defaulted to ‘Black’ rather than the ‘Random’ I’d prefer for ‘Your Colour’.
Apart from this, I have encountered a player who wished to practise as one colour specifically, too.
Most of my games are tournament games where stronger player always plays as white, and because my rank is higher than the average (~8k) i also play with white stones far more often than with black.
To balance that, i always set my custom challenges with random colours and no handicaps.
For me, the only reason why i would set myself as black or white would be if i especially want to play some specific strategy like dual 5-3’s or mirror-go, tho its been long time since i played those xd
I didn’t read all the comments, but something is weird about the opener statement. If you play ranked, weaker players usually get to play Black and stronger players get White. So I don’t get the point about too many players playing as Black.
If you think your opponents don’t play reasonable enough, maybe you should create custom games, restrict ranks and challenge higher ranks. If you challenge stronger players, usually you will get to play Black and they will be White. Or you just force yourself to be white in a custom game. You can do that as well.
So yeah… that entire argument doesn’t make any sense to me.
I admit server population is a problem though,when looking for games.
I’m not sure why you’re finding this problem. You appear to be a 4k player usually playing similar ranks. I’m a 10k player; at my level I find all my opponents to be reasonable in their play. I really don’t have an answer. When I played at IGS, and later at Yahoo! and KGS over many years, I never had this problem.
I think that’s only true if you play a game with auto handicap and the rank difference is at least 1. If you play without handicaps then the colours are going to be determined randomly, unless the players choose the colours themselves.
I might be wrong (and too lazy to test it now xD), but i think automatic colours will always give white to the player who has higher ranking (according to the ± value), doesnt matter if theres handicaps or not.
But yeah, since the average rank on the site is about 8k, if you’re above that and playing with random opponents using automatic colours and without any rank restrictions, its expected that you’re getting white more often than black.
I tested this pretty thoroughly a while ago and would be interested in any evidence of a change (e.g. from handicap tournaments), so I can update this wiki page:
Pretty sure auto handicap doesn’t have anything to do with the players who play hundreds of games at almost 100% black or white though.
Making the stronger player white by default but still using komi is… Unusual, to say the least. In any setting other than ogs, giving white to the stronger player implicitly but unambiguously means the game will be played without komi.
I am also surprised that I have never noticed this behaviour before, and yet most of my opponents are not within ±1 rank from me.
Within 1 rank colors are assigned random, for bigger differences stronger player is white.
Allright, let make a example. Look at a user called " [KJLand] " …If you look at this game history you can see he have over 400 ranked game in a row as black, not a single time white.
Not saying he do anything’s illegal or whatever. Just than those player only play custom game offer where they are forced black. And he is not the only one there is dozens like him in the 4-1k range.
Yes, IGS indeed have much more reasonable and old school play.
OGs feel like every game is “offer trade of A for B” then “decide B is too good after all and make overplay invasion to try to deny what they just given you”…then “end up with 3 different weak group and try to make a big fight out of what originally have no need to be”…Then try to desperately overplay some more out of the original overplay by trying every poke, cut whatever they can find hoping for a mistake so they can recover.
This whole make unnecessary fight and hope opponent make a mistake or you lose mentality is just…so boring after a while. It feel like they don’t even bother learn proper direction of play and fundamental becasue they just turn everything intro a unreasonable mess to begin with anyway.
YMMV. I know people who find IGS style boring. Personally I play on several servers (mainly OGS, Fox and IGS, sometimes KGS and Tygem) in order to meet opponents with many different styles.
tbh this partially sounds like just…
them not knowing (or realizing) the effectiveness or reductions
I know I’m usually happy (from a winning perspective) to play against a moyo player (although, not so much from an interest perspective) cuz a lot of the time I’ve found that american omoyo players don’t handle reductions very well at all (possibly due to not dealing with them very often, as amas tend to opt for invasions)
