Life In 19x19

A few comments on the opening

(;GM[1]FF[4]CA[UTF-8]AP[CGoban:3]ST[2]
RU[Japanese]SZ[19]KM[0.00]
PW[The Many Faces of Go]DT[2016-07-18]VW[]
;B[dq]
;W[cd]
;B[pc]
;W[qp]
;B[ec]
;W[hc]
;B[ef]
;W[cg]
;B[dc]
;W[co]
;B[cr]LB[ep:A]C[This looks really weird, because it's on the second line. For example ...

Not rendering the board for me in Chrome (on Windows 10)

In your example, the toothpaste had already been squeezed. Please show an example of an earlier situation!

It is precisely the fact that the margin of victory DOESN'T matter that leads to the exciting fights we see in high level games.

I'm not sure this is true --- I remember reading somewhere that in settings where the margin of victory matters, games tend to involve a lot of risk, because both ...

I was thinking the same thing but I don't see much profit for white there.
At the moment, there are much more important places to play on the board (the shapes look incomplete in three corners, plus both the top and the bottom is very wide). But the fact that this weakness exists in black's side ...

The first thing that comes to mind is that black's shape has an obvious weakness, so if black does not reinforce, white can aim for sequences like this:

$$W
$$ ---------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . O ...

Why would you feel the need to call him out at all? I don't think you can really expect the rest of the world to adjust to your behavioral desires.
Don't know exactly why, "it annoyed me" is I guess the most honest answer I can give. It was stupid though, and I will work harder to suppress similar ...

Ok, so there is a question whether the concept of komi in 9 handicap game is is valid. Yes, to me this is obvious (or at least: as obvious as the same question about komi in a normal game of Go) --- fair komi is a property of the game, not of the players.
Not just if it is valid, but rather if a ...

If I am asked a question, it is up to me to decide how best to answer it. If in my opinion, the question has a false premise, I see nothing wrong with disregarding the intent of the question until the premise has been cleared up. In this case, the question was based on the premise that in a 9 ...

Not sure I understand your what you're getting at.. I wasn't complaining about the OP, if that's what you think! My last reply was w.r.t. EdLee's hidden, maybe that was confusing

EdLee, this is thing: it is not hard to take any question about a non-trivial subject and start generating lots and lots of related questions / sub-questions, etc. That is not providing an answer, it's a behaviour that we can call "pretending to be wise", because it can give the appearance of ...

Hey EdLee, I guess I'm sometimes too easily annoyed by what I consider to be overly-philosophical non-answers...

I read back and see that I wrote too sharply, and I apologise for that. No ill will intended.

Of course one can always say that the difference between any two players is unique, but I ...

No, it is not; komi for even games (6.5 in Japan/Korea; 7.5 in China, etc.) is not a magic number pulled out of a hat; it was a result based on thousands of actual pro games, over some span of time; it was determined empirically, and adjusted accordingly, and is still subject to change given new ...

1 stone is worth twice komi (easy to see if you consider black passes for his first move, it goes from black first and white get komi to white first and white gets komi; to balance this back to the original fair position but with colours reversed white would need to lose his komi, and then give ...

EdLee wrote:What do you mean ? It's the only way to find out.

That's like saying the only way to find out what komi to use is for every pair of unique players to play against each other lots of times, to calibrate their special komi. Is that how you usually do it?