I vehemently disagree. Go IS a long game, 20 minutes is perfectly reasonable for standard speed. There’s blitz if you want shorter games.
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I’m inclined to agree with Bob, unlike 9x9 there’s only so fast you can do roughly 120 things with a moderate amount of consideration.
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so, after big enough OGS update “ai board” will just stop working?
This is what chess community thought over the years, and thanks to blitz and faster clock settings, started to popularize “massively”.
Well, OGS has blitz already. 
My point is Chess started to grow a lot when fastest community started to adopt fastest game modes. Before, any chess player refused to play less than 30min clock, and now 3+2 is probably the most common format (outside tournaments, of course). My reply was related to “Go IS a long game”, as chess, but online chess is mainly a fast format. BTW, if you see other platforms, taking Fox as most popular Go platform, people play mostly an intermediate time setting, not the slow setting
Not talking about blitz at all, but to reduce main bank time by default.
on 19x19 Go blitz there are too many timeouts on OGS for some reason. Those who don’t timeout start to have incorrectly high rank
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This is exactly what got me on this feeling. I played several games on fox, and then played a game on OGS and it took soooo long that I just went back to fox. Too difficult to get good practice when you are focusing on repetition of the fundamentals and not deep reading.
Edit: I like the idea that 20 min games still exist, but 5 min and 1 min games need to become more popular. Go has a tendency to be held back a lot by its own culture.
I missed your point, my bad.
It’s a valid point but but I’ll oppose one objection. Let’s do a bit of math: a reasonably long game of go reaches 100 moves per players. The standards speed consist of 30 seconds per move. Of course, the rythm of the game isn’t constant, but since it is usually slower in the beginning, we’ll assume every move takes in average 30 seconds, for simplicity.
With that in mind, if your base time is 5 minutes, you play about 10 stones in your regular time before enduring byo-yomi for the rest of the game. Spending 90% of your game in overtime, THIS, in my humble opinion, is paradoxical.
If the base time is 20 minutes, then a player will play about 40 stones in that interval. Note that the length of the game will be about the same, the player will simply have a more relaxed time at first.
“But spending most of the game in overtime is the standard in asian servers, and in some pro competitions in japan” you might reply. It’s true, but I think it’s an unnecessary constraint, and here’s why:
Adding 15 minutes at the base time will NOT increase the game’s length by 15 minutes (well, 30 minutes, since there’s two players 
). It will simply increase the time where players don’t have to play in 30 seconds. If the rythm is constant at 30 seconds/moves, then 5 and 20 base times will result in 0 second in length difference. If the players are twice as slow during the main time, then the length will be increased by just 7,5 minutes per players. So increasing the main time doesn’t have that much of an effect on the total length. This shows, I think, why keeping the player in overtime 90% of the games isn’t useful (it causes a slightly faster opening).
Instead of “go is a long game” I should have said “go has a lot of moves.”. Changing the base time from 20 to 5 minutes won’t have that much of an effect on the total length, and will just cause a more stressful beginning. If you want quicker games, you need to diminish the rythm, which is why we have 10s/moves as blitz.
On the contrary, for long games, I like to take my time a bit in the opening, and thus I am very satisfied with the 20 minutes base time for standard speed. I understand if you don’t share this feeling.
As for comparing with chess, it’s important to note that nothing of what I just said applies to fischer time. So yes, IF the only setting on OGS was fischer, 20 minutes base time would be ridiculous (OGS caps the fischer time at 5 minutes in standard speed). And yes, with fischer, I see the benefits of decreasing the base time to have quicker games.
This is not the case in the slightest. I can hardly get my students over 10s per move. Looking at your games it is also the case that you don’t exceed 15s often. (I only looked at a couple.) You can check here, OGS Stats
30s is far more than enough for most player’s ranked games. People only feel it isn’t enough after a mistake. Very often is reviews I see speed speed speed long time. The long time is usually after a mistake happens and they need to figure out how to fix it. The previous times were wasted and could have prevented the mistake in advance. So the assumption that moves take 30s is not even close to the reality. I’d wager most are less than 10s.
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Wasn’t aware of that.
This doesn’t change my point tho. If players maintain a 30s/moves averages during the game, having 20minutes or 5 minutes as base time won’t change anything.
“Very often is reviews I see speed speed speed long time.” True. But with japanese byo-yomi you’re heavily restrained in your “long time thinking”, while every move done in 5 seconds is 25 seconds “wasted”. With fischer time, however, i agree with you. You’d need like 15 or 20 seconds per move in order to have a similar rythm as a 30 seconds byo-yomi.
The conclusion is that Fischer time should be more popular. Why doesn’t the automatch setting consist of Fischer time?
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Personally I only use fischer. I’m convinced the western go community stick to byo-yomi only because of habit.
Byo-yomi might make sense in competition, with a long base time, which encourages players to take their time for the opening (while fischer encourages players to be quick at first). But on the internet, Fischer should be the rule (although I like pandanet’s system a lot too.)
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Exactly, this is the point I tried to express. Sorry for my bad english. I understand Go is a long game, you enjoy playing long games and tournaments should have “long” timing settings.But for average online play and to get Go more popular, we need something in the middle of 20min normal and blitz, there are so many difference and should be a balance between fast games without being blitz (what is called Rapid in chess)
But players are always more comfortable in bank time than byoyomi time because byoyomi is there always. What I mean is players tends to (no data, just I guess) spend bank time because there is overtime. In overtime you can make sure moves will not take longer
I noticed that EGC tournament being played is using fischer time. Wich fischer time settings do you use ?
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I agree with this as well. I’m also a fan of Fischer, this is also after over a hundred hours of research of sports in general and what makes them fun and engaging.
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Tournaments with Fischer are also better for the directors. It’s much easier to know how long matches will take which makes planning a time sensitive event smoother.
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I also feel like 20 minutes of main time (whether its with byo-yomi or fischer) is somewhat “in between” of being quick casual game and long serious tournament-style match.
If i want to play a quick game that isnt yet some crazy blitz, i’m fine with just having 5 minutes of main time with 10-20 sec ficher or byo-yomis, but if i want to play some more serious match i would rather want something like 40-60 minutes of main time.
But one thing worth considering is the difference for blitz and live settings. There should be noticeable difference the two, if the defaults are too close to eachother then whats the point of having those as separate option. (tho one might claim that it really would make sense to combine the 2 categories and just call them “short games” like they’re listed as open challenges, but thats probably worth its own topic)
Guess one traditional way of judging whether something counts as ‘blitz’ ‘live’ or ‘correspondence’ is about breaks.
In blitz game, you dont really have enough time to have any breaks without timing out.
In live, you should have enough time for a quick toilet break or even smoke a cig if you really need to and you havent yet used all of your main time.
In corr, you can go to sleep and play your move on the next when you’re well-rested and have considered all the possible moves you want to play.
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1min + 2sec would be a nice blitz.
5min + 5sec for normal match
20min +10sec for long match.
I am a novice in Fischer still so my +sec might be a little off.
For anything else, players can use the custom option.
I would also like to see what fox does.
1min +2s (500) Where 500 represents the number of games being played with this time setting. This lets people know what the most played one is.
One thing OGS does which is nice is let you be in multiple categories when clicking the automatch button. It raises the chances of getting a match.
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The European Go Congress 2023 uses Fischer in the main tournament. It’s fairly long though. Today my game took 5 hours, and we didn’t go to scoring.
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