xed_over wrote:The beauty of using Chinese based rules for beginners is that you don't have to worry about if stones are alive or dead, you can just play it out and capture them (if you can), without loss in score.
At the same time, the deeper problem is that if Uzziel can't tell dead stones from living stones, then he is missing something very basic about go, in general, regardless of the scoring system. Honestly, I don't see any serious problem with beginners losing or not losing points for capturing the stones that they think are still alive. After all, if they genuinely think the stones can be saved they should have played to capture them before dame (probably significantly before dame) and they would have lost the points under either scoring system.
The serious problem is that many beginners are so sunk into a fog about whether stones can be captured or not that they do not bother to make defensive moves when a defensive move might be sensible (because there is some niggling worry that a defensive move might be unnecessary), and then go ahead and make the defensive move anyway at the last possible second (because there is some niggling worry that a defensive move might not be unnecessary). This fog should be something that needles beginners. Likewise, sometimes beginners are in a fog about life and death and feel the urge in the middle of the game to make discrete, 1-point eyes inside an enormous territory. Again, this should be something that needles beginners. In practice, I've found that losing the point for "filling in your own territory" bothers beginners way more than losing a point for not playing a dame, or even than losing 2-10 points for not making a normal move that affects territory. Exactly how many points the unnecessary defensive moves, extraneous eye moves, etc. costs a beginner does not particularly matter; being needled slightly by the way the Japanese rules frame the point loss is very valuable.
Uzziel, please: show us examples of games near the end where you can't tell whether a certain stone is dead or alive. Let's get to the bottom of this!
stones are completely surrounded, and black can capture them no matter what white does. Therefore they are counted as dead and are treated as black's prisoners. The middle white group is not dead, as no matter what black does white can forever avoid capture (by forming two eyes - if black 'a', then white plays 'b', and vice versa). The black groups are all alive as white cannot capture any of them.
below. Notice this puts the 
stones into atari. So black is forced to play a move inside his territory at 
in order to remove the atari, which costs him one point.
below, then black's 