Life In 19x19

After I dug my old goban and stones out of storage I decided to count them and noticed something strange: There were many chipped and cracked black stones (I had to discard about 7 stones as unusable due to razor sharp edges), but only one minor chip on a white stone. I mentioned this to my opponent the other day and he said he and his brother had noted the same phenomenon, that their black stones suffered damage far more often. Is this something that is common, or do we just have two coincidences? Why would black glass be more prone to break than white?

It's because the weaker player winds up with Black in handicap games. Their weakness permeates the black stones making them more fragile.

- Marty Lund

SCWillson wrote: Is this something that is common, or do we just have two coincidences?

I will add one to your anecdotal list. For various reasons (I won't bore you unless you ask) I bought a beat-up, second-hand set of glass stones from Japan off Ebay. When I removed all the chipped and broken stones, I had way more white left than black. There were plenty of chipped and broken white stones, but not nearly as many or as badly broken as black. In fact, I discarded almost twice as many black as white.

SCWillson wrote:After I dug my old goban and stones out of storage I decided to count them and noticed something strange: There were many chipped and cracked black stones (I had to discard about 7 stones as unusable due to razor sharp edges), but only one minor chip on a white stone. I mentioned this to my opponent the other day and he said he and his brother had noted the same phenomenon, that their black stones suffered damage far more often. Is this something that is common, or do we just have two coincidences? Why would black glass be more prone to break than white?

Shame to toss them. You can get emory cloth and polish off the sharp edges easily. They're a surprise in the bowl, fun to fondle and can change the flavor of a perhaps overly serious battle back to a friendly game.