Share your games with 6+ groups

I have to admit, reading that discussion I’m not sure I understand group tax… maybe I’m overthinking it

Group tax is an artifact of the stone scoring rules, which were probably the original rules of Go, later emulated by area and territory scoring.

In area scoring, your points are your area (ie. including the walls).
In territory scoring, your points are you territory (in. what is within the walls) plus the prisoners you’ve captured.

In stone scoring, though, your score is the maximum number of stones that you could theoretically place on the board.

It was considered that a player could not add so many stones in the “theoretical post-game placement” that they would fill in their own eyes, since that would kill their group.

Thus, every group required two moku for its eyes, which were spots where a stone could not be placed and thus a point couldn’t be scored. As such, a “group tax” of two points per group emerged from this premise.

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That makes sense but maybe what I don’t understand is why group tax was abandoned? I didn’t follow the explanation in the link …

In Japan, stone scoring was replaced by territory scoring.
In China, it was replaced by area scoring.

Without stone scoring there’s no emergence of group tax.

If your question is why stone scoring was abandoned, I’d suggest that in China it was the effect of contact with the Japanese in the early 20th century, and the move away from the cross-hoshi fixed opening.

Why, and even when, the Japanese adopted territory scoring is something probably lost to time.

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stone scoring is fill all empty spaces until you can’t play self atari, right? I assumed the answer was just laziness

possibly off topic for this thread but related to group tax, I found this interesting post while searching around

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I imagine the actual placement of all those stones was always only implicit.

2 stone handicap game against CrazyStone iPad 6k (played during a long work call, shh)

check out the seki in lower left, could count as 6.5 groups? :joy:

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You mean 5.5 perhaps?

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image

Very aggressive opponent trying to follow big kill strategy, so I was sort of forced to live with many groups.

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OGS Honinbo 2008 (Main Class), Round 3 Group 1 is a game I won with 7 separately alive groups. I actually won that game in endgame, which is unusual for the player with many groups as generally the opponent will get to bully them into small life whilst making nice yose. Shows the importance of yose.

Btw, how are people posting board images: is it simply taking a screenshot, cropping and then uploading image, or is there a more direct way?

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One trick is to do the following, replacing the number after /games/ with the game id, eg for your linked game

<img src="https://online-go.com/api/v1/games/177455/png?.png" width="381" height="381">

produces

and then if you want to make it clickable like Gennan, with anchor tags

<a href="https://online-go.com/game/177455"><img src="https://online-go.com/api/v1/games/177455/png?.png" width="381" height="381"></a>

I suppose screenshotting with cmd+shift+4 on Mac or Windows+shift+S on windows 10 lets you draw and capture part of the screen either.

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is it simply taking a screenshot, cropping and then uploading image

For this primitive sabre-toothed cave bugcat, yes.

However, you can also crop straight from the screen on some browsers.

I could do that, but I just haven’t become used to it.

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Found one while spectating, W ends up with seven groups

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2 more games where I had 6 groups (and won):

That makes 3 games in my last ~90 games. Is that a high frequency of having 6 groups?

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When I saw this thread title, I briefly wondered why any groups would want to see my games.

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https://online-go.com/game/43223726

Had this very nice game the other day

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Not sure if this counts… in this KataGo game, black and white each ended up with five living groups. The game was a draw :slight_smile:

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I’m pretty sure 5 < 6, so no.

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I can see 5 groups on each side.
This makes 10 total.

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Yeah, I knew the thread title meant 6+ groups for one player, but I thought 5 groups each was also pretty impressive ;3

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