Life In 19x19

This must be a silly question but, what happens in a real game if you spend all your stones? Do you pick some from the captured ones and note them somehow for later counting?

Most common technique is prisoner swaps - put 10 of my prisoners in your bowl and 10 of your prisoners in my bowl. Often stones run out because of lengthy ko battles, so both players have lots of prisoners.

Like in real life: exchange of prisoners

Using area scoring, prisoners are irrelevant (you'll see many players just throwing prisoners back into bowls with NZ/Chinese rules, which is arguably annoying).

Arguably annoying ? Just to know, what are the cons according to you ?

Some people prefer to use Japanese style counting during the game, so you may want to count prisoners.

Loons wrote:Some people prefer to use Japanese style counting during the game, so you may want to count prisoners.

Also it's pretty off-putting; as someone who is very used to Japanese counting, it'd really break my concentration for my opponent to put prisoners back in their bowl as a sort of "wha, that's not meant to happen..." just instinctively .

Just discretely reach into the bowl belonging to the player next to you.
( Prior to doing this, you should ascertain that they are the proper color )

This isn't a totally trivial matter. Games more than 400 moves long are not out of the question and in such a game it might happen that even exchange of prisoners doesn't do the job. Also, if you are using Ing equipment, borrowing stones from another set might mess up the counting; at the least you'd have to give each player the same number of extra stones.

gowan wrote:This isn't a totally trivial matter. Games more than 400 moves long are not out of the question and in such a game it might happen that even exchange of prisoners doesn't do the job. Also, if you are using Ing equipment, borrowing stones from another set might mess up the counting; at the least you'd have to give each player the same number of extra stones.

I'm not positive this is true. A full set should have 361 stones. At the point where one player runs out of stones completely (all 180 of his stones are on the board), all the remaining dame should be the result of captures.

jts wrote:

gowan wrote:This isn't a totally trivial matter. Games more than 400 moves long are not out of the question and in such a game it might happen that even exchange of prisoners doesn't do the job. Also, if you are using Ing equipment, borrowing stones from another set might mess up the counting; at the least you'd have to give each player the same number of extra stones.

I'm not positive this is true. A full set should have 361 stones. At the point where one player runs out of stones completely (all 180 of his stones are on the board), all the remaining dame should be the result of captures.

today's new math is still hard for some people

jts wrote:I'm not positive this is true. A full set should have 361 stones. At the point where one player runs out of stones completely (all 180 of his stones are on the board), all the remaining dame should be the result of captures.

not true if there is a long ko.

speedchase wrote:not true if there is a long ko.

A long ko where only one of the players is making captures? If both players capture stones then prisoner exchange is possible again.

Sverre wrote:
A long ko where only one of the players is making captures? If both players capture stones then prisoner exchange is possible again.

good point. what about a snap-back?

I think if you get to the point where prisoner exchange fails and you started with 181/180 stones, then someone should be resigning...

At the go club, not all the bowls are completely full so borrowing from other bowls when you do run out is common enough.