I restarted because it came out. I had only just bought a 19x19 magnetic weiqi board off Amazon 5 years ago, but with no-one to play it sat collecting dust. When i saw The Surrounding Game i decided to google and see what had developed. Here i am now, playing daily contributing to OGS and reading everything i can get my hands on for free.
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Exactly, With people becoming more and more dynamic, we donāt tend to spend time searching and reading stuff about what we do.
Even feeding them with the forum wonāt be a great success because, uh well, same.
Are there any resources available to help a beginner know when he has lost the game? I had such an experience recently where my opponent was upset because I kept playing even when he was sure I had lost. I did lose, but I was not sure I had lost yet.Is there ever a time when your opponent tells you to resign that you shouldnāt listen to them and keep fighting? I suppose thereās a bit of a cultural aspect too. My inclination is to fight to the death, while clearly that is considered to be rude here.
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Welcome to the forums (and the server) @MPuren 
Iād like to reassure you that your opponent was WAY out of line and Iām sorry you had such a poor welcome to our site. By and large, our community is nothing like what he displayed. Yes, you did play well beyond the point a more experienced person would likely resign, but thatās just itā¦ experience only comes from experience, thereās no skipping that step. You clearly labelled the game as your first, and Iām sorry your opponent wasnāt more helpful.
The main thing I would encourage is that the 19x19 board is a lot bigger than the 9x9 and so you get a bit stuck playing on one sideā¦ in my own personal journey, I found Nick Sibickyās YouTube videos helpful. This might be a nice one to start with
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One useful sign that the game is over is if the opponent passes.
If you donāt have the experience to tell, and you want to be courteous, then when your opponent passes and you canāt clearly see how you could change your fortunes, that is actually a good time for you to pass.
It is your right, but it is starting to verge on impolite, to keep playing āexperimental probably hopelessā stones after your opponent has passed. It does run the risk of you being seen as trying to stall to play the clock, which is not OK.
If the opponent has not passed and is hassling you to finish, then they are definitely way out of line, and you should not respond in chat, but rather press the ācall moderatorā button and let us help them understand whatās OK and what is not.
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See also this thread:
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Team coming out in force on this one 
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One thing Iāve often heard is that DDK (Double Digit Kyu) players should rarely resign in even games because their opponents should have the same opportunity to blunder as they themselves have and had ā¦
And I think you should call moderators ANY TIME an opponent tries to rush you to end the game since itās just rude, I can hardly think of a situation where urging the opponent to end the game is appropriate.
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I would like to bump up this thread because we got some fresh news coverage about Lee Sedol retiring, and we may get a bunch of new players right around now.
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might as well give them a tag ābeginnerā in bold right next to their name to begin with
Itās not that easy, because we donāt know what the playing ability of newcomers is.
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OGS system works systematically wrong with beginners. Just played with beginner who played 1-1 point, then self-atari after self-atari. I gave link to easy Go rules explanation, they answered āstop putting linksā. I started to explain that placing stone that I can destroy in 1 move is useless, but they left. Now they play SDK after SDK and certainty(Ā±) of their 13k rank is decreasing. And rank is increasing when someone resigning to escape from moves that make no sense.
There should be ābeginner modeā which new users can choose. Ranks should be clearly explained to them first. And there should be some restrictions, so they unable play ranked vs SDK for a while or their rank drops faster for a while.
I donāt know what, but at least something should be done.
Current system makes no sense. It only wastes time of both beginners and SDK. Rank correctness only decreasing.
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I had a very similar experience recently, although the person I played was more appreciative in the post game review. But I looked at their history and saw several ranked automatch against SDK which they won by resignation, I guess because the opponent was frustrated, which had pushed their rank up early. I wonder if the default rank should be weaker? Itās seems to me the trade off is: if the default is stronger, it means more weak beginners play against stronger, vs weaker default it means strong players with new accounts play more as they rank up? If Iām understanding the ranking system correctly, the latter seems better, because itās unlikely to have ābad dataā introduced, because itās unlikely the weak players a strong new account playing with beat them accidentally, but stronger players expecting an even game might resign to save themselves time against an over ranked beginner.
Not sure if my reasoning is sound thoughā¦ also wonder how big a problem is it really? But I guess the thing I would worry about is new players getting discouraged thinking they are playing even games due to over ranking, and then quitting entirely
edit: I see this is a long discussed topic already, my bad didnāt read all the linked threads. will just offer this suggestion:
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I did question this, with some odd behaviour highlighted on GitHub. It seemed like a beginner could repeatedly loses to SDK players say, their rank uncertainty keeps decreasing which I thought was sounded silly, from what I thought deviation should mean. Realistically all you gain from the losses is that theyāre somewhere below the ranks they lose too, but actually have no certainty of their real rank. Maybe thatās not what the deviation is supposed to mean? I dunno, and I still havenāt gotten around to reading the Glicko papers!
well, the idea is that your skill during a game comes from an approximately normal distribution with average r (your true rating) and deviation 400 (not your Ratings Deviation, thatās something else my bad). So no matter how much stronger you are there is some small % chance you lose, it just gets smaller as the ranks drift further apart, as there is always overlap for the distributions. So the more consistently you lose to someone, the further apart you are likely to be
your system rating mu, and your ratings deviation phi are just a distribution of probabilities r lies at a certain number
but the idea behind it getting smaller when you have only losses comes from a basic idea: you are getting more information that you are not likely to be the ranks closer to the victor, but not as much information about the ranks further away, so the bayesian update results in a thinner distribution.
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on a similar note though, it seems that maybe thereās a fault with our current implementation, as a friend of mine came across this user oreo63, that has only ranked losses but is rated 15k (no question mark), presumably because their opponents were too high rated that the descent was slow, but looking at https://online-go.com/termination-api/player/1018046/v5-rating-history (although I havenāt used a calculator to check the math) it seems to be operating as normal, albeit very slowly descending.
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So the first two losses increased the rating and then it started to go down slowly?
Or is the rating graph not reflecting the data?
the rating graph is probably reflecting āhumble rankā, where youāre being paired one standard deviation down from the actual behind-the-scenes rating (1500), showing that the deviation is probably reducing rather quickly compared to the descent of the actual rating. You can see the behind-the-scenes rating in the api link I gave
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IMHO - I feel like this long-standing problem could be solved by asking all new OGS members to jump through a few simple hoops, and then assign them a provisional rank accordingly. I donāt know how much programming would be involved on the back-end, but I would love to see something like this:
QUESTION 1: HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN PLAYING GO? (not studying, not aware of, not watching anime, actually playing Go)
QUESTION 2: DO YOU KNOW YOUR CURRENT RANK?
If response is āI DONāT KNOW BECAUSE I JUST STARTED PLAYINGā - > Assign user a provisional rank of 25kyu, and send them to the ālearn to play Goā page on OGS.
If response is, āI HAVE PLAYED FOR LESS THAN 1 YEAR BUT I DO NOT KNOW MY RANKā - send them to a page that forces them to complete 3 beginner-level tsumego. If they pass - send them to a page with 3 intermediate level tsumego. Keep going up in tsumego-level difficulty until they get 3 wrong. Use the previous level to assign them a provisional rank.
If the response is āI HAVE PLAYED FOR X YEARS, AND I KNOW MY RANK AND IT IS Y KYU OR Z DANā - then send them to a page that forces them to do 3 tsumego appropriate to their stated rank. If they get those 3 right, do another 3 from a harder rank. Keep going until they get 3 wrong, and then use the previous level to assign them a provisional rank.