I just played my first game with my father in law. I have been playing capture go and dont fully understand the scoring of normal go. We played on a 9x9 board and he was black and I was white. I let him start with 4 stones on the star points since it was his very first time playing. At the end of the game he had a score of 12 and I had a score of 8. With the handicap we had who won?

Generally, in handicap Go, there is either no komi, or 0.5 komi, so he won by either 4 or 3.5 points. This is assuming you are playing by Japanese/territory scoring (i.e. one point for every point of territory and one point for every dead/captured stone of your opponent). There are other methods of scoring, but they generally will return a result within one point of each other.

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Handicap stones give the weaker player an advantage during the game. They do not affect the final scoring.

They do affect the scoring. Each handicap stone is worth one point more with area-scoring than with territory-scoring. So you need to increase the komi by 1 for each handicap-stone(except the first, which is no real stone) when using area-scoring to keep the score close to the territory-score.

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I think it would be methodically better to have the komi increase for each handicap stone except the last one.

Black handicap stone - White passes - Black handicap stone - White passes - Black handicap stone - White passes - Black plays a stone - White plays a stone.

So White has to get three pass stones to keep the area-score identical to that for territorial scoring.

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Generally, it takes some time for new players to learn when the game ends and how to score. (Could be up to a few weeks, more or less.)
Learning more about Life-and-Death takes time. This is normal.
If you have specific questions, upload your game record here
and people are happy to help you.

It might be easier to start with area-scoring. That way you can continue playing until all dead stones are removed without affecting the score.

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Sanity is for the weak.

With Area Scoring, one does not even have to know what dead stones are.:)

http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/simple.html

To get a score of 12-8, obviously you counted only the empty spaces. Your father in law won by 3.5 points. (white gets .5 points in a handicap game so that white wins ties)

Had you counted both empty spaces and stones, under some rules (AGA being one such rule set) you would need to compensate white for the handicap stones, which is what some of the above posters are talking about.

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