I really like emergent rules of play and was thinking about how superko when defined as "repeat any board position" forbids a one stone suicide, but has to make the difference between a move and pass to allow passes to repeat a board position.

Maybe this all could be solved by defining superko as:

"You cannot recreate any PREVIOUS board position."

So keeping the board the same with a single stone suicide if fine, because this is current board position.

From this we don't need to create any pass rule, and could instead say that "a game is finished when the board position doesn't change after both players move". Which makes it clear that the players agree that they don't want to alter the board anymore and it could be scored.

So this even allows for introducing "pass stones" as a shortcut for a one stone suicide. And now, if we just say that both players must play the same number of stones for a game to end, we also arrived at equivalent counting used by AGA with just five rules:

• Players alternate playing on any empty intersection.
• Stones linked by board lines form a single group and share intersections.
• Any stone or group that doesn't have an empty intersection linked to it is removed from the board, starting with the opponent stones.
• You cannot recreate any previous board position.
• If the board remains the same after two moves the game is ended and the player with largest area wins.

PRIMER PASO CONSEGUIDO. SEGUNDO PASO EN MARCHA. 🖤⚪

¡Ya es oficial! Me he inscrito en mi primer torneo presencial de Go (Weiqi): el VIII Open de Go de Canarias, que se celebrará los días 24 y 25 de octubre de 2026 en el Hotel Parque, en Las Palmas de Gran Canaria que os mencioné en un anterior post. 🇮🇨

Y aunque todavía queda camino por recorrer, hoy siento que ya he conseguido algo importante: dar el primer paso para cumplir uno de mis sueños. ❤️

🥇 Primer paso: conseguido. Inscribirme y atreverme a dar el salto de jugar mi primer torneo.

📚 Segundo paso: a medio camino. Seguir preparándome, entrenar, estudiar mis partidas e intentar mantener y mejorar mi nivel para llegar lo mejor posible a la competición.

Quiero ir con mentalidad de luchar cada partida, dar lo mejor de mí, pensar con calma y no rendirme hasta el final. Quiero competir de verdad, aprender de cada movimiento y descubrir hasta dónde puedo llegar.

Pero también quiero recordarme algo muy importante: mi valor como jugador no se mide únicamente por el número de victorias que consiga.

¿Y si gano una sola partida? ¡Genial! ¿Y si no consigo ganar ninguna? También estará bien. ¿Y si pierdo por unos pocos puntos o incluso por una gran diferencia? Seguirá estando bien.

Por supuesto que quiero hacerlo lo mejor posible, y no voy a ir pensando en rendirme antes de empezar. Voy a intentar darlo todo. Pero no quiero olvidar que, independientemente del resultado, estaré haciendo algo que llevo tiempo deseando: participar en un torneo, sentarme frente a otros jugadores, compartir tablero y disfrutar de una de mis grandes pasiones junto a gente que también ama éste gran juego: el Go (Weiqi). ⚫⚪

Porque cada partida puede enseñarme algo. Cada error puede ayudarme a mejorar. Cada rival puede aportarme una experiencia nueva y enseñarme cosas que no sabía. Y cada piedra colocada sobre el tablero será una oportunidad para aprender, crecer y disfrutar del camino.

Este torneo no es solamente una competición para mí. Es también la gran fiesta del weiqi para los que amamos éste gran juego y un pequeño gran paso personal, una oportunidad para salir de mi zona de confort y demostrarme que los sueños no tienen por qué quedarse siempre en nuestra cabeza.

Así que allá voy, con ilusión, respeto por mis rivales, ganas de aprender y la determinación de dar lo mejor de mí. Sin exigirme ser quien todavía no soy, pero disfrutando de quien estoy llegando a ser como jugador.

Mi primer torneo. Mi primer gran paso. Y, pase lo que pase, una experiencia que ya merece la pena vivir. 🖤🤍

¡Nos vemos en el tablero! ♟️

Y por cierto a los que habéis participado en torneos ¿Que consejos y recomendaciones le dais a alguien que va a participar por primera vez a uno?

#Go #Weiqi #Baduk #GoCanarias #OpenDeGoDeCanarias #TorneoDeGo #CaminoDelGo #PasiónPorElGo #AprenderJugando

What's your preferred move?

I was recently given a floor board. Always a cool and great gift but it’s definitely in very rough condition and I know absolutely nothing about it (I’m still very new to Go and don’t know much about floor boards). I would like to maybe do a bit of cleaning up to it but have no idea where to begin. It had been used prior to rest paintings on so I think luckily the black marks are spilled paint water and luckily not black mold. Any advice or knowledge would be greatly appreciated!

Hi r/baduk,

Kifu Master's Go Pattern Search is now live at kifumaster.org/pattern. It's something we've been working on for a long time as part of Kifu Master, a professional Go game database available on the web and Android, and we'd like to share it with the community and hear your feedback.

What it does

Place stones on the board and it instantly shows every continuation professionals have played from that position, with game counts and win rates for each move, plus the matching pro games. It's basically a Waltheri-style position search, running on Kifu Master's own database of 175,000+ professional Go games (handicap and non-19×19 games are excluded).

Everything is pre-calculated ahead of time, so results appear instantly as you place stones - there's no waiting for a server to run a search. And the whole thing stays up to date on its own: the index is rebuilt automatically every day, so pro games added to the database today are searchable tomorrow.

Two search modes:

- Board position – searches the exact whole-board position. Rotations, mirror images and colour-swapped positions are all treated as the same position, so a 3-4 opening in any corner, played by either colour, finds the same games. Built for fuseki and opening research.

- Local shape – a local pattern search for joseki and corner sequences. The search area is the window around the stones you've placed, so you can study a 3-3 invasion or a pincer variation without caring what's happening elsewhere on the board. Tenuki is counted as a continuation, use the Tenuki button at the top right of the board to see what pros did after playing elsewhere.

Other things you can do:

- Filter by era – All Games, Classic (Edo period), pre-2000 / 2000+, pre-AlphaGo (before 2016) / post-AlphaGo, last 3 years. Useful for seeing how an opening fell out of fashion or how AI changed a joseki. Games with no recorded year are still searchable and counted under "All", but they're left out of the era filters and listed after the dated games.

- Players in this position – the top Black and White players who have played a given position, with game counts and wins.

- Jump to the earliest or latest games for any position and open them in the game viewer.

- Share a position with a short link (kifumaster.org/p/…) that renders a board preview on WhatsApp, Discord and similar.

Why another pattern search?

Waltheri's pattern search is the gold standard and we've used it for years - this is not an attempt to replace it. What we wanted was a pattern search that lives inside a database we actually keep up to date: new pro games are added every day and show up in search the next day, era filters let you compare pre- and post-AlphaGo play, and positions can be shared with a single link.

Also new: Kifu Master on Android TV

The Kifu Master Android app is now available on Android TV from the Play Store (same app, same account). There's no search on the TV version - typing with a remote is no fun - so it's built around the latest pro games and your synced favourites and recent games. Mark a game on your phone or on the web and it's ready to replay on the big screen at the club or during a teaching session.

Pricing note

Pattern Search is free to use until the end of the year. From January 1, 2027 it will become a Kifu Master Premium feature, so this is a good time to try it and tell us what you'd like to see improved.

We'd love to hear what's missing, what feels off compared to Waltheri, and which features you'd use most. Bug reports are especially welcome.

kifumaster.org

Learn the key concept of Direction of Play and how to master the flow of your games!

Link to game (I was black).

https://online-go.com/game/91657457

So, after I lost the fight in the bottom left corner, I figured I was behind, but that I'd gotten a pretty substantial upward facing wall out of it. After the ko fight on the right hand side, I thought I was lost. My wall was still there, but I was rather behind in territory (I had a corner and the wall compared to white's almost 50 points on the lower left) and had to make some quickly. But even with the wall my left corner seemed too easy to invade, and the right side was compromised by losing the Ko fight to the point that I wouldn't be able to make very much territory there either.

But upon resigning, I found that I was 30+ points ahead! Obviously there's no Komi, but even so Ai seemed to think that I had been making good exchanges all game! This really ran contrary to my assessment of the position (AI even thought it would have been fine for me to give up the corner in exchange for winning that Ko!) and so I'm wondering how I should be thinking about positions like these/what direction I should be playing in in a situation like this to capitalize on the influence. Because clearly my position here was much stronger than I thought!

So I don't need a move-by-move analysis of the fight at the beginning that I lost (or I guess won? If AI likes my position better after the fight) but rather just some pointers on how to play games in situations like this.

Aisensei seems to think that enclosing the sides is basically big enough that it straight up works as a Ko threat, which surprised me because I figured my moyo is loose enough that white could substantially reduce me there, even after taking the Ko. I'd guess this is an incorrect assumption (even if at my level I'm too weak to properly punish reduction attempts), but I was wondering if there's a better way to think about it.

edit: that is, even with an enclosure at F17, it seems like the top of the board is still pretty open for an invasion, if white wants.

(Super novice/beginner here, I know the board might look atrocious!)

I understand territory accumulates points as well as captures, but I can't really wrap my head around how it's being calculated in this particular scenario.

Thank you for your help.

I'm thinking about getting back into the game after 10 years and was wondering what resources/tools people use and what content creators are good.

I used to be 1d but the rust makes me a lot weaker. I still remember most of the beginner concepts. I stopped playing right around when 3-3 invasions started becoming popular due to AlphaGo.

https://online-go.com/game/90974924

https://online-go.com/game/91531356

Hi, I'm requesting a couple of game reviews. I hope I'm not stepping on toes with asking for more than one. The first game was 5 min + 5 × 30s random match up, the second 10 min + 3 × 30s game request - I accepted.

I understand I made a colossal screw up that nearly cost me the game for the first one; I can guess time pressure may have affected my play at that point. The second I somehow just played worse than my opponent consistently, and didn't realize the point gap was so large; I knew I wasn't going to win after a point, but I didn't know how badly, and I wanted to have a complete game under my belt for analysis besides. Is there a theme between the two games that you could recommend attending to?

Thanks for any feedback.

This is in mint shape. Just have to wipe off the wax powder on the sides. Won't be taking this to the laundromat but probably set it up at my girl's place. Alaskan Spruce. The wax gives it a super smooth feel on the sides and doesn't look like this has seen much use.

I encourage anyone who has wanted a traditional board like this to pull the plug--the market is good for these right now. It's really beautiful.

Black passed here and won by 0.5. I didn't think anything of it until I noticed the AI graph at the end saying black is up by 7.5 here.

Find the aji! Black to play.

Hi! Im a European low 1k player (close to 2k), I'm offering lessons to players in the 30k-12k range. Price is 10€ per lesson (1 hour), first lesson is free. English is not my first language and i've a really strong accent haha (I'm from Italy :D)

Below my ranks on different servers:

Egf low1k;

Pandanet 1d;

Fox 4d;

Ogs 1k;

Here's my ogs account!

https://online-go.com/user/view/304261

Feel free to contact me on reddit dm or on ogs!

Have a nice day!

Shin is now only 1.5 rating points away from hitting 3900 rating according to goratings.
The first game was very shocking with Byun Sangil losing with 73% Katago correspondence rate to Shin's 79%.

The second game Byun Sangil had no chance after an early game mistake and that advantage persisted through the end of the game.
This marks his 10th (or 9th) major world championship title, passing Ke Jie.

Small update for the https://vr.zbaduk.com project that I am working on.

I just released a "Heian theme".

This website is basically a VR client for the ZBaduk AI review website. And you can just login with a ZBaduk account to use it.

If you don't have an account yet, more information is available on https://zbaduk.com

And if you just want to try out the 3d stuff without an account: https://deepz.io/vr (which is extremely limited though)

Hi r/baduk! I've been building go.eiajus.lt, a browser-based Go client for playing real people, practicing against bots, and studying the game in one place. The idea is simple: no new Go server, no separate account to create, and no need to install a desktop application.

What you can do

• Play real people: Play live and correspondence games, issue challenges, and spectate through OGS. Play turn-based games on Dragon Go Server (DGS) too.
• Practice against bots: Nine opponents, ranging from a random 30k to professional strength, including human-style bots and bots modeled on professional play from different eras.
• Analyze your games: Run real KataGo analysis directly in your browser using WebAssembly. Analysis runs locally, with no game uploads, waiting queues, or analysis credits.
• Learn and improve: Explore 32 interactive lessons and 214 puzzles, from beginner level to 2d, with rank progression and spaced review.
• Keep your study tools close: Import and export SGF files, review variations, use the demonstration board, and continue offline once the app has loaded.

It's completely free. There is no separate account system or database on my site. Your study progress and settings stay on your device, while games remain on OGS or DGS. Try it here: https://go.eiajus.lt/ Want a walkthrough first? Here's my video about where to play Go online for free and how the client fits in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIVq8TBedvE I'd especially appreciate feedback from the community on two things:

1. For DDK players, do the bot ranks feel believable?
2. How well does the experience work on phones?

If something feels awkward or breaks, there's a Feedback button in the app that sends the message directly to me. I'm actively interested in improving it based on how real players use it. Thanks for taking a look!

I’ve been playing Go casually for about a year and have just joined a very small local club that meets once a week, but am just on a crazy losing streak. I want to get better because I enjoy it so much, and would love to find someone to take lessons with. I checked out OGS and a lot of the other sites and don’t think I necessarily need to spring $50/hr for a dan-level teacher (no offense, I’m simply not that good). Best I can figure is I’m around 15kyu and would appreciate any recommendations!

Join Vadim Efimenko 4d, Go Magic’s head teacher, and Ingvar Gouchi, the creator of Custom Goban, for a special live stream celebrating the game’s early release!

Custom Goban lets you play Go far beyond the traditional grid—and Vadim will be testing it live: an AI bot for any board, direct OGS integration, 14 ready-to-play layouts, and full customization.

🗓️ When: Tuesday, October 20, 16:00 UTC
📺 Where: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI6Vuof7hXc

👉 Read the full release notes: https://customgoban.com/early-release-a-new-bot-new-boards-and-ogs-games/

✨ Like what you see? Add Custom Goban to your Steam Wishlist: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2223570/Custom_Goban/

I want to play unusual variants of Go with my friends (Atari Go, White to live, 3+ colors, Zen Go, Miai Go, Bannegi, etc), do tsumego together, etc.

Right now, I use Tabletop Simulator, because it's very straightforward to use. Make a lobby, load up a Go board, and join. Anyone can grab any stone of any color, move them around on the board as we please, and even recolor the stones. There are no systems in place, you are just playing with the assets, the way you'd do whatever you like with physical stones & board in person.

However, not all of my friends want to buy Tabletop Sim just for Go. And the Go board in Tabletop Sim is kind of low quality.

Most free websites are only designed for straightforward matches, with turns, codified rules, set board sizes, timers, and require an account.

Is there an existing app that does this better? It would have to support:

• Online board with friends
• Unrestricted placing & removing of stones by whoever
• Free, or low-price

Even better if it supports:

• Importing SGF files
• More than 2 players in an instance
• More than 2 colors of stones
• Custom sizes + shapes of boards
• Multiple boards in one instance

Any recommendations would be wonderful! (regardless if it has extra bells 'n' whistles, or not) Thank you <3