Really- only black in 9x9 games

I’m a crap player so take this for what is, but why so many folks playing only black 9x9 games? I know that sometimes it seems my settings default to black but like 40 games in a row. I have a feeling some people are going to pipe in and say, “just working on my game”. To me it seems symbolic of larger issues, but my larger issues is that I’m a crap player so…

I’m sure you’re not a crap player :slight_smile:

In any case I don’t think anyone has to play both colours, I know it’s a bit unusual, and you’ve already anticipated some responses like “working on my game”. In other games than Go I have met players like that where they want to practice strategy from one side. With Black you can pick the opening that you want to practice I suppose.

Other than that maybe they just don’t want to play White, either they think Black is better with the current komi, or who knows really.

It could be different for each person.

In any case while it might be disagreeable to some I don’t think we need to critique or criticise these players in a similar way I don’t think we need to criticise someone only playing unranked over ranked say as an example.

One might argue it’s not fun to play the same player always with the same colour, or that they won’t improve or various things, but they might not care about that either.

I think you can always block a player you don’t want to match with, and that’s probably a good solution.

Anyway I hope you’re enjoying playing on OGS otherwise.

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“Only black in 9x9” could be an illusion. If you look at your game history, you can see that it’s pretty evenly split. You played white in 28 of your most recent 50 9x9 games:

But I can understand why you might feel that way. When it happens five or six times in a row, you may feel like everyone’s choosing black when it’s really just random chance. And it may make you notice the games when you’re white and not the ones when you’re black.

The other thing is that the 5.5 komi technically favors black. So some players will take it when given the choice to give themselves the benefit of that slight statistical and technical advantage. Or they might be more comfortable playing one color. Or they might want to practice one color or opening.

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My understanding was that they were talking about specific opponents they’ve played that chose only to play Black in their most recent games.

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Right. A good amount of my opponents lately only have black games in their history. Of course anyone can do what they want, but I question the desire to always have advantage when playing such a game, but oh well.

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I’ve definitely had similar feelings, not so much in Go lately but in other niche games, where you don’t have too many distinct opponents available. I’ve definitely gotten mildly frustrated when someone plays the same colour over and over, but I guess I’m trying to move beyond it myself also.

Have these games a kind of komi to balance the advantage?
If not (my guess) then being the challenger who can win with a starting disadvantage can be really fun. I feel this when i play free to pay games without using the advantages provided with money spent.

A lot of them actually have a pie rule instead, where the first player plays a certain number of pieces of each color, it could be one and none, one of each, two of one or so on.

Then the second player gets to choose which colour to play as.

So if you like the first turn advantage even despite having to offer a suboptimal first move then there’s a good way to still end up as the first player (whichever colour that is) over and over for instance.

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Bit like colons of catan system? (Too much hazard in this one anyway)