Which opponent do you like: the one who knows how to use resign button, or the one who just keep continue playing to see the scoring?

Interesting. So instead of taking just 15 or so more moves to finish the game, black was so annoyed that they decided to prolong the game even further hoping the opponent would click the resign button, and failing to achieve that desired outcome, tried to publicly shame the opponent. Is 15 moves simply too long to wait, or is there certain honor associated with winning a game by resignation? Go is such a strange game. :thinking: Itā€™s the only game Iā€™ve played where youā€™re discouraged from trying your best till the end.

I mean itā€™s not the only game where youre encouraged to resign in a losing positionā€¦

chess-the-queens-gambit

But I can see how itā€™s needed more in go because the game can go quite long if either player wants to prolong it.

I also take issue with the idea that resigning isnā€™t ā€œtrying your bestā€. Some people play until the end, never bothering to evaluate the position. In contrast, a person who takes time to estimate the score and realizes they are behind has put in the greater effort.

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Some people are so scared of ā€œbeing impoliteā€ that they always resign in the mid game, and when a close game finally makes it to end game, they lose because they never practiced that part of the game.

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Or folding in poker.

So what youā€™re saying is Go would be improved with mandatory bets before each stone is played? :thinking::sweat_smile:

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Perhaps a doubling cube like backgammon has would be an interesting addition to go (especially in a jubango or mego).

I would encourage this (doubling the earned points for the rating) if this can make think a bit more if you should resign or not.

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OGS triple-pass is a bit like a doubling cube: but the reward is an instant win (saving you time and no opportunity for later mistakes to lose the game), risk is it doesnā€™t trigger and you just lost a load of points: Anti-Stalling - #6 by Uberdude

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I have to admit the strangeness to me is in large part due to my lack of experience with many games. I donā€™t play chess and have never watched that show, so I donā€™t get the reference. I guess the expectation to resign is something common in board games. My experiences with games are mostly through sports, where games typically are longer than Go on average (at my beginner to intermediate level), and itā€™s more common to try your best to finish each game.

I disagree with this though. If I quit something solely because I think Iā€™m losing, Iā€™d say Iā€™m not trying my best. Whether someone else is making even less effort than me is not relevant. Of course, you can argue whether trying my best is the sensible thing to do. If my house is on fire, then trying my best to finish a Go game is probably not ideal, but that would be a different question. And I find it interesting that, without any further information, the mainstream opinion is that it is wrong to take only 15 more moves to finish a game rather than resign.

I guess this is the key difference in our perspectives. I tend to play only games where there is something intrinsically fun for me in the game outside of winning and losing. So it is impossible to unnecessarily prolong a game when everyone is making their best effort. For example, I enjoy thinking about tactical fights and optimizing end game sequences, and those things are always there regardless of the score.

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Based on my limited knowledge of poker obtained through movies and such, folding looks like just a tactic to maximize your winning (or minimize your losing)? It feels more like sacrificing a group in Go rather than sacrificing a whole game.

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I thought that a go game was one of the longest activity between sports but this could be due to play mostly with a board and stones. Internet go in fact is very blitzy. For reference a friendly game face to face takes like over an hour, more frequently near one an half. Chess games take like half the time. A soccer match is about the same but many sports last less.

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I have a lot of respect to this side. Furthermore because in a game of go with a fair pairing it is not so easy to keep a won position to the end.

But the more you progress the more you understand that you canā€™t win a badly lost position anymore and both players may have something better to do as going to the counting (like playing another game sometimes). I mean itā€™s like invading someone very secure territory, after a while because of your experience, you donā€™t do it anymore because you know it will be wasted time for both players.

Winning or losing may not be as important as some people think it is per se. But itā€™s still what drives your game and bring most of the substance.

Finally there are two schools about early resignation, one to not play a lost game anymore because you are cheating yourself in the evaluation of the game, and the opposite one where you should keep a fighting spirit and try harder to reverse the result. Itā€™s up each game and each player to determine where is the limit.

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I mean yeah, we are all here for some other reason besides winning and losing. (Otherwise we could go play rock paper scissors)

But I still think itā€™s important to play to win. Otherwise there are so many uninteresting games that could be played. For instance, it might be fun to spell my name on the board in every game. But I donā€™t do that because I would no longer be offering my opponent a decent game of Go.

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I think a game of Go is longer if you donā€™t count the pauses that usually happen in games of physical sports like halftimes and timeouts. But I feel itā€™s appropriate to include the pauses in this comparison since if I understand it correctly, the reason Go players are discouraged from continuing a game to the end is to allow their opponents to have the time back to their lives. If you apply the same argument to a basketball team losing by 50 in the first half (which did happen to me :rofl: ), the halftime period would be part of the time they give back to the opposing team if they resign.

When I was playing organized sports in high school, a baseball game could take two hours, and a basketball game could take one and a half hours. Me and my teams were always the worst in our leagues in every sport, so I had plenty of chance to be told to try my best. :joy: That probably affected how I view resigning in Go.

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Youā€™re right. Now that I think more about it, I am guessing winning and losing plays a bigger role in the fun of strategy board games than in physical sports, which might be why I never gravitated to games like chess, since I did not find anything that was fun to me that was independent of winning and losing.

When I play a friendly game of baseball, soccer, or any sport, the group can always just decide to end the game anytime without needing any resolution, often without even keeping a score. Fun is more or less uniformly distributed over the time you play. The longer you play, the more fun you have, and score is just secondary. This feeling is common among people I play with in all the sports I play, but it is rare among the Go players I meet.

I think even in a casual friendly game of Go, most people will feel the game is wasted if there is no final resolution. And for most people, once you feel there is a clear winner, the fun diminishes. So most of the fun is concentrated around the moment when the winner becomes clear. Stopping the game earlier or later than that optimal point drastically reduces the overall fun you can have. So there is a conflict when the two players have different opinions of when that optimal point is.

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Well the fun is not about the fact itself of winning but about how you got to it, which opinion on the moves you have regarding the goal to finish with more as your opponent. A game in which your opponent donā€™t care to get more is quickly a very boring game.

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I think just about everyone would prefer an opponent who resigns as often as possible. But some players play on to the end in order to practice their endgame, and that is their right. You should take the opportunity to practice your endgame too, because youā€™re probably bad at it. (Not you specifically - most people are, including me.)

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Haha, just a wild thought. Maybe OGS can implement a ā€œmercy ruleā€, something like if the AI determines a player is ahead by 20 any time after move 30 in a 9x9 game, that player is declared the winner. And when you create a game, you can choose to have mercy rule enabled. So you donā€™t have to worry about whether your opponent knows how to use the resign button. And if youā€™re winning by a lot but not quite meeting the threshold, you can try to push your lead and so will have something to play for.

In case this turns out to be a stupid idea, I want to add that Iā€™m not trying to be sarcastic lol. Just a thought that occurred to me.

Is it selfish to think that you can still learn from a totally lost game and continue to play, or is it selfish to think the opponent should give up in a totally won game to not waste your time? :confused:

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