Survey reply

Continuing the discussion from 2nd Annual Australian Go Census:

I am in Sydney. I am playing as part of my retirement past time.
No formal training of the game. Just play for fun and get a ranking somehow.
Still do not know the differences between all the rules like Japanese, Chinese or Korean.
Can anyone explain. Only playing this game for a few months.
Also played the game strictly by the fact that mistakes are made by everyone which means a mis click in computer term and do not believe in undoing any move even though it is a genuine mis click of the mouse. My rank varies from 18 Kyu to 12 Kyu depending how my mood goes and the number of mis clicks I do in a day.

My understanding of the main difference between the Chinese and Japanese systems is whether you get points for spots with stones on them (Chinese) or not (Japanese). This obviously leads to differences in strategy.

This site has a pretty good list of the differences between some of the major rulesets: https://www.britgo.org/rules/compare.html

I just finished studying this for my book! In short, the rules affect the resolution of games, especially scoring. Chinese rules use area scoring, meaning all the area you occupy, which is the total of your stones and the empty points that reach only your stones (territory). Japanese and Korean rules use territory scoring, meaning your territory minus any of your stones that were captured in the process.

How you score the game also affects when the game ends. Under area rulesets, stones are counted in the score, and so the players fill all the neutral points (so-called “dame”) before passing. The major point of territory rulesets is to abbreviate this step–stones are not counted in the score, and so the players need not fill any neutral points before passing. Unfortunately this has made territory rulesets the favorite of experienced players while causing much avoidable confusion to new players about when the game ends and why it is that they should not be able to force their opponent to spend moves (and thus lose points) capturing clearly dead stones that are inside their territory. For this reason, I always recommend Chinese rules to beginners.

Hope that helps. :slight_smile:

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Hm, no offense intended, but the title doesn’t fit the content (I can’t find a discussion in the referenced thread) and the content is incoherent (also, shouldn’t survey replies be made on the survey site?) and none of this has anything to do with the announcement category.

Did Onceagogo try to answer the survey by creating a thread here? (Didn’t check the survey because I’m not Australian :stuck_out_tongue: )

I don’t understand.

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Thanks Allan. This is agreat help.

No strategy is almost exactly the same for all rulesets

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IMHO - there are only very rare cases where the difference between the Chinese and Japanese scoring might add up to a 0.5 or 1.5 point difference, so it would only be a factor in VERY close games.

If someone is ahead by 4.5-6.5 points, it doesn’t matter which system is used to scrore - the same person will win :wink:

In other words, unless a LOT of your games come down to these types of hair-thin margins, I wouldn’t spend too much energy worrying about it

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