Life In 19x19

Everybody likes to see high game quality, regardless of time settings or "timesujis". But even "timesujis", which are non-optimal, can be exciting for folks in the "spectacle camp". By "spectacle camp", I refer to fans who are interested in the spectacle, independently of interest in competing on their own.

There is something very exciting to me about watching a professional game live. It's totally different than replaying the game a few days later. I remember when Kim Myungwan and Andrew Jackson used to do commentary of big matches live on YouTube. I was there live, and could comment and read the comments of other people during the event.

It was truly exciting to feel the atmosphere during the tournament. I could speculate which moves were going to be play, and I could feel the tension throughout the game.

Sometimes the pros would make mistakes, and the commentators would explain why. The mistakes being made, while lowering the quality of the game, didn't detract from the excitement - it made things more exciting!

When time pressure came into effect, things were no different: even though the commentators and AI already "knew" who was going to win, in the live competition the result was uncertain and exciting. Maybe my favored player was behind. Given an optimally quality game, the result was already clear. But humans don't always play optimally, and the competition was still exciting!

These days, if you want the highest quality of go, as much as I hate to say it, you should probably just buy a nice GPU. But there's so much more to pro competition than that. Knowing a player, and feeling the excitement of live competition where humans make mistakes due to time, fatigue, or whatever... It's exciting, and I hope it continues!

One other thing I'd like to emphasize is that professional go is exciting exactly because the result of a match is uncertain. Yet, the level of play is high enough that amateurs have a lot to learn from the moves that come about under those circumstances.

I'll maintain, as I have before, that sometimes high level creative moves are possible exactly because of the pressures of competition - which can include time pressure.

The games I played that I have enjoyed the most are usually the ones without any time constraint, played at the local pub. And for a while, I used to dread the moment my opponent got into byoyomi during tournaments. In fact, I used do the opposite of what Shin did: play slower and sometimes play easy to answer moves when my opponents was low on remaining byoyomi time (luckily, I stopped this bad habit since).
So I sympathize with the general sentiment of the thread. Time constraint and clocks are a necessary(?) evil and I always disliked the fact that they became "part of the game" in chess.

If we transfer this thinking to go, we can say that the reason we have pros is to produce game records, preferably of Messi-like quality. When spectacle fans play over games, they usually don't know what the time limits are, and quite possibly don't even care. Or what the prize money was. All they really care about is the quality of the game.

The relativity of time also has influence in John's distinction: A "beautiful kifu", a "work of art", is something that is appreciated after it's finished, when the kifu is published in the newspaper. A spectacle is bet appreciated live (well... real-time) because uncertainty adds a lot to it, and in go that is possible only in the last decades. That accounts for shorter thinking times.

Also, I'm a simple man, I see 'Messi' I upvote but let me say that (1) Messi will and has scored a 'hand of god' goal. (2) millions here will admire Messi's gentleman play on TV on sunday and get on the dirtiest tricks on their own 'friendly' matches on monday.

botija wrote:

If we transfer this thinking to go, we can say that the reason we have pros is to produce game records, preferably of Messi-like quality. When spectacle fans play over games, they usually don't know what the time limits are, and quite possibly don't even care. Or what the prize money was. All they really care about is the quality of the game.

The relativity of time also has influence in John's distinction: A "beautiful kifu", a "work of art", is something that is appreciated after it's finished, when the kifu is published in the newspaper. A spectacle is bet appreciated live (well... real-time) because uncertainty adds a lot to it, and in go that is possible only in the last decades. That accounts for shorter thinking times.

Also, I'm a simple man, I see 'Messi' I upvote but let me say that (1) Messi will and has scored a 'hand of god' goal. (2) millions here will admire Messi's gentleman play on TV on sunday and get on the dirtiest tricks on their own 'friendly' matches on monday.

Well they may watch Messi, but also others who are not exactly shining examples of playing cleanly ..
And don't forget millions more would also be ladylike/very gentlwomanly, gentlemanly in their own games, too. Personal identity comes into play here .

I feel like many of you commentating haven't had much tournament experience. Sorry, I just feel like it's a weird philosophical viewpoint. The clock is part of the game.