3.75 is the usual komi in China. It is only for us westerners, used to the Japanese way of counting, that this is usually expressed as 7.5 points.
The reason is in the way the Chinese count. Since Chinese scoring uses area (own stones + surrounded empty spaces), rather than territory (surrounded empty spaces + prisoners), every point on the board belongs to someone (except shared dame in seki).
To win, therefore, a player simply had to have more than half the points on the board, i.e. more than 180.5 points, ignoring komi for now.
So the score might be 181-180, or 182-179, or 185-176.
The usual way to count is this:
- remove all dead stones (return them to their owner).
- divide all points in seki equally between the players (you can now put stones on them to mark their owner). If this is odd, one seki point will be left, giving both players 0.5 points.
Count only one color (e.g. black):
- Rearrange that player's territory (surrounded empty spaces) into multiples of ten. To do this, feel free to remove stones from the territory, or add stones from the bowl to it. (this is usually where westerners get confused
) - Count the territory, remember the value.
- Now, remove all white stones from the board, then rearrange the black stones into clumps of ten stones (plus some left over). Do not, at this point, move stones to or from the bowl!
- Count black's stones.
- Add black's scores together, to get a final score.
If the final score is more than 180.5, black wins.
Now, to have komi come into the picture:
- After totaling black's score, substract the komi value from his score. (if you counted white, add the komi to his score instead).
Now, with 3.75 points, suppose that Black had 184 points on the board. Substracting 3.75 gives a score of 180.25, which is not enough to win. Black lost by 0.25 points.
If black had 184 points, then White had 177 (it has to add up to 361). So by our standards, black was 7 points (184-177) ahead on the board, and with the komi of 7.5 (double of 3.75) lost by half a point.
Had we counted white, then we would have gotten 177 + 3.75 = 180.75 for white. Just enough to win by 0.25 points.
The reason for the X.75 instead of whole or X.5 komi, of course, is to make ties impossible (including those cases where there's an odd number of shared dame in seki, giving half point scores)
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John Fairbairn
