[IDEA] Go blitz tournament with cash prizes

[phillip1882]

i'd like to play as well.
i have no idea how strong i am. i've beaten a 9 dan and lost to a 15 kyu.

[SoDesuNe]

I'm sorry, given the span this makes you - on average - weaker than 5d. If you tune in and post insightful analysis of the played positions in the chat I might reconsider ; )

[RobertJasiek]

OGS automatic scoring handles this pretty fine in accordance to, I guess, "Verbal-European Japanese Rules".

No. OGS, as I understand it, uses AI. This means that any partial coincidence with a particular ruleset is accidental.

I was in the organising committee of mulitple OTB tournaments over the last years and "Japanese Rules" was the only thing we announced.

Taking pride in your systematic mistake. Apart from that,...

such real world tournaments have an implicit context of some verbal Japanese ruleset (not necessarily European because not all tournaments are in Europe and some European countries had a slightly different verbal rules context before the European-Verbal Japanese Rules appeared). Such verbal Japanese rules are reasonable for practical application.

Refuting to declare them and instead insisting on a reference to all Japanese style rulesets is unreasonable, as is OGS by doing so.

People were fine then, people will be fine now.

1) Many people do not know the details of Japanese rulesets. Instead, they make a subconscious, implicit assumption of some sort of verbal Japanese rules being used. This has the practical consequence of them being reasonable for practical application. So people are more reasonable WRT to rules than OGS and you.

2) In casual server games, it does not matter much if one loses once every few hundred games due to seki or ko ambiguity in the rules. (And more frequently by not noticing the consequences of forgotten teire mishandled by servers.) In tournaments, however, each game matters. Also the occasional game with seki or ko arcana matters. For this, it is insufficient to pretend people would be being fine. Serious players will notice such things when they occur and in tournaments will take action, i.e., they will then not conform to your lazy dream of "everything is just fine". For these cases, it is your responsibilty to decide the outcome of such games before the start of the tournament so that each player will get his fair result, instead of making an arbitrary decision after the incident occurs. The purpose of a tournament is a competition of skill of the players - not the tournament director replacing their skill by his arbitrary arbitration.

By declaring "verbal Japanese rules" before the tournament start, you meet practice, enable yourself to judge competently and (for Japanese style rules) minimise the frequency with which you have to judge at all.

[SoDesuNe]

I was in the organising committee of mulitple OTB tournaments over the last years and "Japanese Rules" was the only thing we announced.

Taking pride in your systematic mistake.

Nope, just showing the world goes round without you needing to understand physics.

And I don't even need to pretend or "conform my lazy dream" (actually, why are we getting personal now?), I can base my assumptions on experience. Tournament games and casual games. Online and offline - on a side note: Does KGS declare which Japanese ruleset it uses?

[Tryss]

By declaring "verbal Japanese rules" before the tournament start, you meet practice, enable yourself to judge competently and (for Japanese style rules) minimise the frequency with which you have to judge at all.

Except that "Verbal Japanese rules" isn't much better defined than "japanese rules"

[RobertJasiek]

Does KGS declare which Japanese ruleset it uses?

As I have said, since it does not, German tournaments run on KGS tend to declare a context ruleset.

Except that "Verbal Japanese rules" isn't much better defined than "japanese rules"

1) Verbal Japanese rules being verbal do not have an explicit definition themselves.

2) Verbal Japanese rules interpreted by me
http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/j_verbal_status.pdf
allow predictable, uniform application in almost all practical cases.

3) For this reason, the EGF General Tournament Rules can have Verbal European-Japanese Rules as one of their valid rulesets of rules of play and predictable, uniform application in almost all practical cases has been the course since the introduction in 1997. Before, the EGF had used the WAGC Rules, then the Nihon Kiin 1989 Rules but application of both was much worse because even the expert interpretations had to cope with the much greater complications and proved too difficult for players and referees. For the same reason, the British and French go associations changed from the Nihon Kiin 1989 Rules to AGA style rules.

4) In a simplistic view on Verbal Japanese rules versus written official Japanese rulesets (in particular, the Nihon Kiin 1989 Rules and the WAGC Rules), one might simply detect all of them to be ambiguous and therefore claim inapplicable. However, that would be like saying that human languages, or laws, are ambiguous and therefore inapplicable. We know that they are applied and application relies on interpretation. For human languages, grammars, dictionaries etc. (or implied equivalent verbal tools) provide interpretation enabling application. For laws, interpretation in courts enables application in cases of ambiguity. The quality of such applications increases with the quality and reduction of ambiguities of the interpretations. For Verbal Japanese rules, a high degree of quality of interpretation is achieved much more easily than for written official Japanese rulesets. Hence, with the sophisticated view of rules interpretation and for the purpose of relative ease of application, Verbal Japanese rules are better definable than written official Japanese rulesets. Compare

http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/j_verbal_status.pdf

for Verbal Japanese rules

with

http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/wagc.html
http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/wagcflaw.html
http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/wagcmod.html

to achieve the same quality of interpretation and application for the WAGC Rules

and with

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Ewjh/go/rules/Japanese.html
http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/j1989c.html
http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/j2003.html
http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/j2003com.html

to achieve the same quality of interpretation and application for the Nihon Kiin 1989 Rules.

[jlt]

If I understand correctly what this discussion is about, some definitions in the Japanese rules are poorly stated and don't express what people commonly understand by dame, seki, etc. so what people use in tournaments is what Robert calls "verbal Japanese rules". Apparently

• Robert's text is the only text in which verbal Japanese rules are well-defined, non ambiguous, and correspond to the common interpretation of Japanese rules.
• Most people in amateur tournaments don't know the precise rules and would trust the referee in case of doubt.
• From a legal point of view, it would be better to use the terminology "verbal Japanese rules", however that terminology is not widespread. People won't understand its meaning unless a sentence of explanation is given.
• In a tournament with "Japanese rules", participants will generally agree that the common interpretation of the rules (="verbal Japanese rules") should be used.
• The AGA rules are simpler to understand and would avoid rules disputes, but correspond to people's habits only in very few European countries (France, UK).

[RobertJasiek]

jlt, except for some simplification, your summary is reasonable.