The rule is obvious and clear. The drama is why our resident rules expert RJ is absent from the conversation.

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

He is busy playing in the tournament!

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

Oh, right. So it is even less ambiguous.

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A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

If I was the referee (And i am not even a referee)
- the move should be taken back.
& Alex should be given a decent amount of extra time. (5 min or even more)

I am against penalties that infringe on the board (extra points to the non violating person oid, making a pass of the move)

on another point
where is the error?

As i see the sgf.

B281 Black takes ko
W282 White ko threat A11
B283 Blach threat answer A12
W284 White takes ko

What is the problem?

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Promotor and Librarian of Sensei's Library

the problem isn't pictured:
B285: black take ko again, which is invalid.

CAVEAT: I am in no way suggesting Mr. Silt did this, I am simply talking about the rule as stated above.

So a player in his last few seconds of byo yomi can INTENTIONALLY make and illegal move and call for a tournament director for a ruling, all the while staring at the board to make sure of something.

Rightly or wrongly, I suspect most players are not aware of this rule, and I suspect there ARE players (not suggesting Mr. Silt) who do know the rule and might very well play this timesuji.

If intent does not matter - does it matter is the same guy keeps doing it?

Putting aside this game's result, I think taking an appeal of this ruling was a good thing - the EGF needs to be sure of its implications.

I agree with this, it appears there is some need for tightening up of the rules, or more explicit about the implications of the existing rules. The fact that players can do this implies to me that something hasn't been thought through well enough.

Excuse me, this is nonsense. Dinershteyn brought this phony argument up because he has nothing else to support his point of view. Neither on the board, nor in the rules. If we start discussing intentions in cases like this, we exactly produce the kind of meta-gaming and bad blood it is supposed to prevent. (Imagine, e.g. a go server would allow to resume a game only, when the connection breakdown was not intentional to gain time. A lot of trouble, but very hard to prove either = bad rule.) Generally, regulating problems that don't exist isn't helpful.

I guess the most important part of the drama is that whenever you need the rules applied in non-trivial cases many drama queens want to have the rules changed immediately because of that.

Cheers,
Vesa

Seems like the bad blood is already here.

I was not there. I do not believe Mr. Silt did this on purpose, which, is, apparently, irrelevant to the rules.

The rules state he has one minute in byo yomi to complete his move. It seems to me that completing his move means realizing he made an illegal move, taking it back, and making a legal move.

I would assume that any discussion of adjusting the clock would be because the unoffending player's clock is running, not that the offending player should get more time.

I doubt, though I was not there, Mr. Silt made a legal move within the minute. Certainly that is Mr. Dinershteyn's claim. I see nothing phony about the argument.

I admire your not wanting to make the disconnected prove their intentions - this is difficult. Yet you seem more than willing to attack the intentions of one of the players in this instance.

You are excused

Forget Dinerchtein, and forget this particular example. The point is, the rules allow you to play an illegal move within a second of timing out, make it look like it was a genuine error, and spend 5 minutes assessing the board whilst your opponent goes and gets a referee to resolve the dispute. I don't think the rules should allow this. Even simply making an illegal move "a pass" would unequivocally fix it without room for abuse - why is my comment nonsense?

I really do not think I am being a "drama queen". I think there is a real issue (not necessarily the particular game, but the rule) and question whether name calling is productive.

Traditionally, Japan has held this to be a forfiet - certainly a forfiet in the Japansese Pair Go rules, for example.

AGA - would punish this as a pass and one point penalty. Putting aside the one point silliness, this is a real punsihment that would have not made a difference in this game, but could be game losing in many.

The European rule provides no penalty whatsoever, indeed, if you are in byo yomi, you get additional time, if not on the clock then in reality.

There are negatives and positives to all three positions. I am not sure which one is right, or which one should change. I find it hard to see how a discussion of the pros and cons of three different rules for handling the same situation should be termed "nonsense" or being a "drama queen"

Just to give an example of how players behave - routinely - in tournaments, I will share my experience attending and running tournaments with Canadian byo yomi. There are many players who routinely take their games in to byo yomi. This remark usually does not apply to the strongest players, because there is often a TD watching, and players around, and usually the counting of stones is taken care of.

This is how many AGA 2-4 dans handle this. Most will be told or notice their basic time is up, or their 10 minutes or their 25 stoens have been played. They will immediately count out the stones and adjust the clock, show their opponent etc.

However their is a substantial minority who will simply call for a TD and stare at the board until someone else does the counting and adjusting. This can give them 5 minutes easily the first time, and a couple minutes as the periods go by. These are honorable guys, if you suggested they were cheating they would be shocked - they are doing nothing wrong. Sure, they are fully aware that other players to not take this advantage, but they are doing nothing wrong.

Now first and foremost, this is more an argument for digital clocks vs chess clocks for go tournaments.

But it is also a window into how the competitive mind of some competitive go player's works. While I would agree that taking advantage of this illegal move rule is to take a step further into gamesmanship, I do not find it inconcievable, nor do I think it is nonsense.

Seems to be an (US)-American problem, never happened to me (and in fact I never heard about it) once in European tournaments Socially sanctioning such behaviour is a much more efficient way to handle the problem than rewriting the rules. Just point it out to them loudly, when it happens, when it happens the second time and once more when everyone is sitting in the restaurant together.

Counting illegal moves as passes or as passes with 1 pt. penalty (as if played as single-stone suicide) are both viable ways. Still, there is no problem in the EGF rules to fix. It was insinuated once and was never actually done. As a TD, if someone comes to me trying to play the rules instead of the game, I would play back in kind and disqualify the person in question, but there is no reason for the EGF to change rules for that. In fact there already is a rule for meta-gamers: "A player persistently breaking the rules with irregular play is considered to hinder the opponent, and may be sanctioned by the referee." Just read two more paragraphs below "Illegal moves".

Now that I think about, this "timesuji" claim sounds like just desserts for Mr. Clock Fiddler...

So, to recap:

1.Ondrej Silt retakes a ko prematurely.
2.The ref announces Alexandre Dinerstein wins.
3.The ref announces Ondrej Silt has to take back his last move and play on from there, and start with a fresh byo-yomi period.
4.Dinerstein is PISSED OFF by this.
5.Dinerstein resigns, and announces he will appeal this outcome.

I'm guessing that Silt didn't do it on purpose, but that's not the problem. The problem is a referee retracting a win. Don't say someone won unless you mean to not retract it for very sure.

It would really upset me if that happened to me.

I still don't think Dinerstein should have the win, but at least an apology for the quality of refereeing would be proper. A little bit more than "oops, sorry!" is in order here.

But, that's just assuming there aren't more details people haven't mentioned. You never know if you're not there to see it happen.

Agreed, on all counts.

Adding a slight wrinkle to the discussion: at what point should an appeal be launched? I was rather surprised that Dinerstein resigned, and then launched an appeal. My natural inclination would be to ask the referee to adjourn the game until the appeal could be heard.

The lesson to be learned is that before you play in a tournament, you should always familiarize yourself with the most current version of the tournament rules you will be abiding by. "Tournament-rule-suji" can be another interesting play indeed.

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

The obvious thing corrected

Cheers,
Vesa

Referees are also volunteers who have a life outside go. Do they have to know every obscure rule by heart? No, higher bodies (ie. appeals committee and EGF rules committee) exist for that purpose. Here, a volunteer had to make a pretty tough call, so he/she made the tough call. Later the ref was overruled by said higher bodies. OK, mistakes happen. Cut them some slack...

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My name is Gijs, from Utrecht, NL.

When in doubt, play the most aggressive move

I don't know about others, but I wouldn't volunteer to be a referee in any sport/game unless I was pretty sure I knew the rules. And if I still came across a situation when I wasn't sure, I would keep the rulebook with me, so I could check.

I don't have much experience of go tournaments, but when I played bridge actively the tournament directors often showed (read) the rule applied to the players from the rulebook. I believe that helped to keep the number of appeals usually quite low.

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