Hey guys,
joined a handicapped game, I am 12k, opponent 9k. Crazy thing is that the handicap was against me…
Can someone tell me what went wrong or is this a server issue?
Thanks!
Happen to my also.
Maybe cause the player choose to play black.
The handicap in Go is always against white. (I don’t actually know whether this is a written rule, but if not it is such a strong tradition of Go as to effectively be a rule.) On OGS in particular, if the handicap is set to automatic, but the stronger player takes black, it will be reversed as you describe. (I think often this happens because the players choose ‘random’ color assignment, not understanding the implications.) This behavior is maybe kind of dumb, and definitely unintuitive. 
My suggestion to the developers would be that selecting automatic handicap should disable the color selection and force the stronger player to be white, as this behavior seems to confuse a lot of people.
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I’m pretty certain you set the color to “random” rather than the default “automatic.”
What mark5000 said, or, you accepted a challenge that said “You play as White” (or “You play as Random”).
When the creator of the challenge wants to play as Black with handicap, the player who accepts the challenge will always give handi to the creator. Just be careful in reading what the challenge says before accepting it. The behavior is not ‘crazy’, and is not a bug.
Then I apologize and will pay attention to this in the future. Thanks.
if a person wants to play black with handicap you are right. but its definately a bug (or at least not quite right) for random color… just disable (dont even allow) random color for hc games in the game settings
I agree. At minimum, I would say that this behaviour is quite unintuitive. Using color ‘random’ together with handicap is pretty weird. Handicap is meant to try to achieve an even game between players; using random color with that handicap only gives you a 50% chance of an even game. I don’t see the point
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