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Basic Rules Of Go
Difficulty: Beginner
Keywords: Rules
There are, unfortunately, several rulesets used in Go. They differ in some of the details but the general rules are the same. The rules given here are not meant to be strictly correct or complete but are meant to cover the bare essentials to support a basic understanding of life and death. 1 - Rule of free placement
The go board starts empty and the players take turns in placing their stones on an empty intersection of the board (like any of the circled points). Once placed, the stones are not moved. 2 - Rule of capture
If a stone or a group of stones have no more liberties left, they are captured (removed from the board).
3 - Rule of connection
Stones of the same colour that are connected along straight lines form one group and they share their liberties.
4 - Rule of repetition
It is not allowed to recapture a single stone which just captured a single stone. Remarks on and implications of these 3 rules:
The right hand black group is said to have 'two eyes' and is unconditionally 'alive'.
The end of the game is hard to define explicitly. In general, it can be said that When both players agree that there are no more moves left which will benefit them, the game can be finished. Take a look at an example game if you want to see how that works in practice. Once the game is finished, the result can be found through counting. The winner is he (or she) who controls the largest part of the board. Again, there are, unfortunately, more than one way to count, although the differences rarely matter in real games. Look at Scoring for more information. -- MortenPahle (10k) Note: I am aware that the above is grossly simplified and not a 'rigorous' way of presenting the rules. Feel free to edit the page, but please keep the page simple and general, so that it can fulfill its purpose, i.e. to enable a beginner to understand basic life and death. Rules discussion is better done at Rules Of Go.
See also This is a copy of the living page "Basic Rules Of Go" at Sensei's Library. (C) the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0. |