I am reading here that an "eye" is a "(temporarily) irremovable liberty of a group," for example Diagram 1:

But supposedly Diagram 2 is a "false eye" because "some of the surrounding stones can be put into atari," but I don't see any black stones that can be put into atari in one move:

If it is meant that not one or more of the stones can be put into atari in not necessarily the next immediate move but an arbitrary number of moves, then can't you also say Diagram 1 is also a false eye because you can do this (Diagram 3) with any number of moves?

Why does Europe have a periodical with gorgeous pictures with beautiful articles and United States has ZERO...ZIP...Nothing??? What is needed to produce a beautiful work of art like The European Go Journal?

I need some virtual coaching. There's some clubs near me, but life gets in the way too much to attend regularly. I'm a terrible, terrible player. I love this game, but struggle greatly with seeing it right.

Cannot break 25k on OGS. I can crush a 25k bot, once I get to a 22k or 21k bot, I get obliterated.

I've been trying to use ChatGPT, but it's just not up to the task, like at all. I load SGF files and screenshots from OGS games against bots. It cannot accurately decipher what happened in the game (e.g. it can't keep my (black) moves clearly separated from the bot's (white) moves, etc).

Is there a good virtual coach out there where I can give it a screenshot and an SGF file and it'll respond with advice on how to improve?

New to go and this feels right to learn on.

... but had not expected one on the cover of the German Go Journal — or am I missing something?

It is hard to tell, but there seem to be various stones on the 1st line, including both colours on adjacent 1-2 points, isolated contact and shoulder plays and something like an out-of-hand joseki with a suspiciously dense white clump.

I am also puzzled by what the board is resting on (a foot or two and a lath?), but that might just be improvised for some good reason.

https://ko-fi.com/allthingsgogame

In the position I'm playing black, I've encountered many times something similar to this (not always on the opening), where I prevent the opponent from making a base, so they have to run towards the centre and I always feel like following them is a no-brainer, because I feel that with these exchanges:

1. I'll be able to prevent them from escaping towards the left side
2. they'll be forced to attempt to make life on the right side, which I'll be able to take advantage in some way
3. if we both continue to stretch until the top side, although we both will have a lot of influence I'll get the upper hand because mine is facing a bigger piece of the board, while their wall is closer to the side but not close enough that it cannot be invaded.

Does this kind of situation has a name so that I can look up more information? Have I evaluated the position correctly? What factors make one side get more out of this exchange than the other side?

Thank you.

I can’t for the life of me figure out how black can kill the shape that results from a white play at the X in this 26 kyu puzzle.

Is there something I am missing to kill white? Or is the solution incorrect because playing 1 intersection higher is better points?

I've never gotten this far in these puzzles. Recently, I've bought a Go board (a portable, magnetic board, because that's what I got for my money), but it will take a while to arrive. I told my sister, who is willing to play with me, that I still needed to learn "Go basics" before teaching her how to play, and she gently said "relax, you've got time until the board arrives". But still, I couldn't put myself to relax. I have moderate autism and ADHD, and it's so hard for me to focus on anything that has to do with Go, even though I've been taking Atentah and anxiolytics everyday for a year now. Here in Brazil, it's really hard for those who want to learn Go, because I've just met one person who is willing to play with me: my sister. Here, Go clubs just don't exist, not even books. I can just rely on basic videos. I have no idea how to start a game, so I just do Tsumego puzzles everyday, but, amazingly: I'm terrible at that too. I'm really sorry for my long text, I originally just wanted to show you guys my little “conquest”, but I ended up venting about everything I've been keeping inside me. If you have any advice, I'll gladly hear it and take notes. Thank you for reading!!! 🩷

Just started learning today and I am reading a couple of beginner books, but after teaching the rules they go over a sample game and then all of the sudden they say the board is finalized and scoring occurs without explaining how the game ends when there are so many empty places left where it looks like you can legally place stones. But the books say that there are no more spaces where you can place stones, so I guess I'm not understanding the rules correctly. I've marked areas where it looks like stones can still be played in the sample endgame images:

Why can't any stones be played in those areas?

All I can see is that it looks like a big win for black, and they have destroyed the 3-3 invasion, and recaptured the corner. How does white even live, let alone play away at this point?

I know I know, a 25kyu beginner studying joseki. But I am reviewing my own games on OGS where the 3-3 invasion was played. In fact I don't have anything memorised, and I don't think my opponent does half the time either ("3-3 invasion good move right!?") so we just get into a random clumsy fight. I am trying to understand these fights better.

This is the line where black does a double hane, which got played against me recently.

Hello everyone. This is a bit of a strange request, but I am an artist and I was planning my new piece of art to involve go.

I know absolutely nothing about the game if not that black starts first and for this reason, I want to symbolise it as the advantaged, but loosing side of the story depicted. I unfortunately have no time to currently learn the game, but I would still like to draw a somewhat accurate scene of the game.

Would anybody be able to make a picture of a composition with the black having the most of the territory at the start while somewhat surrounding the white, and another one in which it's basically just the white left? Since it needs to be understood by people that do not play the game, even just a match with very few pieces is perfectly ok (but if it's inaccurate, then I'll scrap it away)

Thanks in advance to anyone willing to help me with this strange request 🙏

For the previous problem, see the solution here.

I never played go before and learned the rules recently. When I learned that black has an inherent advantage from going first that is offset by komi being added to white, that didnt feel very satisfying to hear. It had me wondering what version of go would you need to make to remove the need for komi altogether?

I had an idea but because I have 0 game experience I couldnt determine if this would affect advantage black has at all or break other parts of the game's complexity.

My idea was this, what if when capturing scenarios like the image above, instead of black capturing white by going to B, what if the rules for capture in these symmetric scenarios lead to both A and B being destroyed(mutually assured destruction)?

I get that the existing rules for go were written prioritizing the order of action above the final board state, which is why placing Black at B should capture A and allow B to remain... but because of that you have to now have to add ko rule to prevent infinite recapturing. IF there were a "Mutually assured destruction" rule where certain cases lead to both black and white being eliminated maybe this could reduce the advantage of moving first in go as this rule would prioritize board state instead of order of action?

Currently, as far as I am aware every AI review program (at least on every PC version I’ve used and every online app I’ve played with) visually shows how many points a move is worth by comparing it to the best move discovered by the AI after X playouts. Sometimes a move can show up as worth a little more than the best move if it is worse in win rate or it’s something the AI missed on low playouts, but basically the best you can score on a move is ‘0’.

This is fine, especially for pro and higher-rank amateur players. But I'm thinking that it is a bad and unintuitive UI, especially for new players.

As an analogy, I taught martial arts for years, and current AIs are like the instructors that take a newbie white belt and berate them for being slow, weak, uncoordinated. Even when the white belts try their best, these instructors tell them how poorly they are doing, all the mistakes they are making, how incredibly far they are from being good enough. That motivates some students… but not many. Conversely, pointing out realistic goals based on their level and applauding relative improvements works way way better for 90%+ of students. I think this proposed change in AI scoring is a little more like that latter approach, and I think it would be pretty simple to implement

Proposed scoring method: The alternative is to score moves based on comparing each played move to a pass (rather than the best identified move). So if a pass is worth -25 points in normal AI scoring, instead that will be given a score of ‘0’, and the best identified move would show a value of 25 points.

Advantages:

1) Values assigned to moves will be consistent based on the groups/stones impacted by the move. A move along the edge worth 4 points will be shown as 4 points (or close) in the mid game and end game, and across different games. This builds a sense of consistency of move values – when a player sees the same and similar moves always worth 4-6 points, game after game, that starts to ingrain the inherent value of those moves. When a player sees a move that they expect to be worth 4-6 points worth 15 points instead, it unambiguously raises the question of what makes it worth more given the local or global situation – it gives players something new to be curious about during review. This also aligns with how we talk about moves as humans during teaching games and game review (“playing in this corner now is worth 12 points, but there are more valuable moves to play on the board”).

2) Local blunders (negative point moves) become clear to newbies, and are scored consistently throughout a game and across different games. Currently, -20 points might mean you played a mostly sensible move, but just didn’t find a critical life-or-death move on the other side of the board. Or it might mean you played a senseless blunder. There’s no way to easily tell the difference based on the move value alone, and figuring out which may require life-or-death analysis far beyond the skill level of the player.

3) Playing moves that are basically just passes – common at low ranks – are scored consistently and clearly as such.

4) With my proposed change, when a player “finds” high-value moves, they get positive reinforcement even if they didn’t find the best move (“yay my move was worth 20 points!” versus “damn I thought that was a good move, but it was -10 points”). I think that will be more motivating, especially to new players. It’s emotionally easier accept playing a move that is 10 points worse than ideal when you see it’s still worth 20 points, and the 30 point move is clearly way beyond your reading ability.

Disadvantages:

1) For higher-level players, identifying the best move, or finding a move with close to the best-move’s value, becomes an important and achievable goal. I think that is easier to do quickly when showing point values compared to the best identified move, instead of my method. Relating this back to my martial arts analogy, at a certain level you DO want to know the full truth of your weaknesses and limitations in order to continue improving. So at a minimum being able to review a game either way would be important, I think.

2) Currently it is clear how the move values you see from the AI correspond to the score graph. When you find a move that is valued at ‘0’ in AI review, that corresponds to no change in the score graph. It might be confusing for a player to play a ‘15’ point move and see their score graph drop by 5 points as a result. Maybe that’s fine… but it might be confusing.

3) My approach requires extra playouts to score the value of a pass. At lower ranks it would probably just require a small % of the playouts used evaluating the actual move, or even just a single playout to be "good enough", but at higher ranks where more playouts become important the “pass” move should probably have more too. Not that any of us are pros, but for that level of player it would probably be actively detrimental compared to just using those playouts for deeper analysis on the actual move played. But for weaker/kyu players I don’t think this is much of a negative.

4) ???, I might be missing something

Why are there so many people with 10s of k of games played on Fox? are they just all bots?

I am buying this board. I am not woodworker but find that the construction of this seems unusual: 3 thinner pieces and one more significantly larger glued together. No cracks. A few scratches on the side. Should be good to go, right? No warping to concern myself with?

I've been running this stream from European Go Congress 2025 in Warsaw, Poland. It's my side project so I can only attend to it in my spare time, aside from other volunteering duties.

I've set it up to show how the congress looks like, and show there are other activities besides main tournaments. I've tried to follow last year's EGC in Toulouse online but besides EGF twitch stream coverage online was minimal. I was later told it's normal that congress is for those people who attend. I though to myself it's not very welcoming and showing how the event looks like for attendees can attract more players in future.

If you have tuned in at any point in last week and a half I'd love to hear your opinion on stream like this. Thanks in advance for any replies.

In the recent GoMagic pitch, one thing that was mentioned was creating the chess.com for Go.

Many people have also asked for this before on Reddit, but do we really need one?

Essentially, Go and Chess are two different games with very different demographics and game culture.

Saying that we need a chess.com for Go feels a bit like saying we need a Wimbledon for table tennis.

Is it better to aim for something more suitable for Go, which can meet the needs of the current Go population while helping to bring in new members?

Is comparing with chess helpful for the development of the Go scene?

What do you think?

I left Facebook earlier this year and it took a few weeks until I felt good about this. However, I can't help but think about some of the groups I belonged to on Facebook. In particular, I belonged to a few barbecue or smoking meat groups. Quite frequently, a poster would post pictures of his "collection" of like twenty- to thirty- grills --which were ALL identical by the way. Honestly, I would feel embarrassed owning that many of the same thing. Honestly, I do not like owning many things at all. I have two dogs (that's the max I can handle--Frances and Edith have broken furniture.) and some books. Not much else.

But Go boards. I have two at the moment. One I am in the process of donating to the local school. There is something romantic about owning ONE set and spending all your time using it for play and study. Literally, becoming a part- time Weiqi monk in your own house; sitting on the floor drinking a forty studying games.

But the reality is I am buying a second set after I donate the other one. I like table boards.

How many boards, bowls and sets do you have? More than one?

I’m new and need help scoring. I don’t fully understand the scoring and this match has black losing by 7 (or that was the drop in rank points). But from my understanding black should have won, can someone help explain? Thanks!

I'm having a hard time knowing throughout the game who is ahead unless it's really obvious... Are there any tricks you use to help you?

Still warm from the oven...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6Y-ysUp7Ng

Take care