Life In 19x19

The average new player? It must depend on how uninfluenced they remain. Those playing for themselves without meeting experienced players have a much greater chance to stay weak than those receiving at least some external advice and input. Yes, of course teaching is very important. But I'm not ...

Wow, 8 responses in 2 hours! Thanks people.

speedchase: I agree with your approach. As you say, testing can be difficult because people’s ranks keep changing. (Here I’m thinking not of the newbies themselves but of the 21k’s we’re comparing them to -- as we go through the process of testing the ...

People often say that beginning Go players are 30 kyu. (Let's treat this statement as referring to an average, since obviously different people will start out with dramatically different playing strengths.) This raises some questions:

History
⋅ Where did this estimate of average new ...

Thanks for your reply. You're right, my ability level corresponds to 13-15k KGS.

I don't know what rank you should be, but since you chose to play a 25k bot (idiotbot?) for your first game, you should assume the responsibility of starting from there.
It seems kind of harsh to say that if a newbie ...

Proposal: Whenever a KGS player gains 3 or more ranks during a series of 10 or fewer consecutive games, exclude from tilde calculations all the games in the series that were against higher-ranked players.

Reasoning: Being accurately ranked is important. A player who is seriously underranked (or ...