I (seriously) think a fixed undo cost is an interesting idea for a go variant, similar to coupon go. If the cost were, say, 5 points, then presumably that eliminates any 6-point blunders or worse from the game.
Mistakes are often not obvious for a few moves, so it might make sense to allow multi-move undos with the cost multiplied by the number of moves to undo, like 5 points per move. I think the cost should be high if you don’t want the endgame to take forever.
One problem would be representing the game history, which becomes more important as players need to know what position they are undoing to. I am not sure whether OGS’s current game tree visualizer is quite enough to capture the history of multiple overlapping undos.
If anything needs to be changed around undo, it ought to be disable undo in ranked games.
This undo button violates the very basic principle of Go and maybe any other games. I recall David Beckham missed an important PK by stepping on a damaged turf area. Did he get the undo? No.
The undo button conveys this wrong message to beginners that undo is part of the game. No, it is strictly prohibited in any ruleset.
Then it comes with abuse of the benign feature. In an online tournament, my opponent requested undo. At that time, my personal rule is to always grant the request automatically. So he took it back and thought a minute, then placed the stone exactly where he placed earlier.
Later, my opponent requested another undo, i ignored.
That was the moment I decided never grant any undo. I feel It is just WRONG in principle.
An opponent once chased me in the chat and challenged me not to allow his undo: what’s a big deal? It is just a game.
My response: what’s a big deal? It is just game. Play on. We can always play another game.
But I know I will never play another game with him.
There are two traditional chinese golden rules of Go on respectful behavior:
Wow, that was the gag in one of my favorite memes in the memes thread (the post has multiple memes, so one has to scroll to find it): Go Memes! 🧐 - #26 by user1
I never imagined it would actually happen.
@jlt posted a video above where Shin Jinseo grants an undo after the obvious clumsiness of his opponent.
More generally, I don’t see how it “violates the basic principle of Go”. I would say a common part of Go is tacit agreement between players, like the agreement required during the scoring phase, the agreement on the status of groups, the agreement not to play dame in Japanese rules (though required by the rules, but unless players agree).
Of course all these disagreements can be objectively settled, and so is undo: you don’t have to grant it and nobody can challenge your decision.
Yes, I know. I was talking about an actual slip of the mouse, not a hypothetical one. Edge cases don’t interest me.
Just to avoid further misapprehensions, I grant undos and I never ask for one. If I screw up, I will take responsibility. However, I’m okay leaving it up to the individual, although that has spawned an expectation by some lax players, who annoy the mods with complaints that their opponent refused to give an undo.
To be fair, IRL games are not the same as online games. There is no possibility of a mouse slip in a real life game, nor of other technical problems, such as a power blackout or a server problem. Go could certainly use a ruleset adapted for online games.
Well SJS doing it shows it can at least be tolerated even in a professional tournament.
For casual games like OGS (where even ranked games are casual), this seems completely fine and I don’t see what “rule and tradition” would go against it. You could say that’s the OGS tradition, if you like.
Again, you don’t have to accept it though. I would even support refusing any undo that isn’t a clear misclick.
