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Rank - as given by Igowin
    Keywords: Culture & History

What about Igowin ranks?

Igowin is a popular, free, MS-Windows 9x9 version of a go playing program, The Many Faces of Go. More and more, players' first taste of our game comes from Igowin (kudos to programmer David Fotland for helping to promote go). One feature of Igowin is that it estimates what your rank is when you play it for several games.

How "accurate" is it? As long as you play only Igowin, its rank is good enough for your needs. But when you play other people, you will find that Igowin tends to overestimate your rank. (For example, on KGS I'm 10 kyu; based on AGA tournaments, I'm 11 kyu; but Igowin thinks I'm at least 6 kyu. Sometimes it mistakes me for a 3 dan.)

These comments may be interesting:

(the following one is copied from Jurgen):

  Confused: The rank display by Igowin
  is extremely unrealiable and tends to overestimate you by 8 to 15
  kyu. Going by my personal experience, if you can beat Igowin at
  even games reliably, your rank should be 20 - 25 kyu on KGS.

(this one's new) Jan: For what it's worth, I'm 12 kyu at the Go Club Utrecht, but playing Igowin, I can sometimes get to 3 kyu. More often, I just happily click away (possible bad habit: Playing as fast as your opponent?) and reach 6 or 7 kyu.

Grauniad: I presume Confused means that if you can beat Igowin at even games reliably, but not when Igowin has a handicap, then your rank is 20 - 25 kyu on KGS. I think this judgement is hard, and that you have to be better than 20 kyu on KGS to achieve this. In any case, we shouldn't expect ranking against Igowin to say much about ranking in general because 9x9 go is so different from 19x19 go!

Jasonred : I used to think this was harsh, but I estimate my own rank at probably 20 kyu-ish, maybe weaker... and I can beat Igowin reliably when Igowin has 2 stones... presumably, this is cause, as you said, 9x9 is too different from 19x19... Strangely enough, my weakness is FIGHTING, and running battles, and any other harsh battles, so why in the world can I manage this on Igowin???

Confused: Yes, Grauniad, that's what I meant. I started to play on Igowin and later on KGS. While Igowin is nice for training small scale infights and life and death, it doesn't touch a lot of subjects relevant when playing on a 19x19 board, like influence, tenuki, getting ahead and opening. In an even game against Igowin, it's fairly easy to win just by building along the center line and pushing. On the 19x19 board, I ended up losing games on the whole board while winning infights locally in the corner.

I had the impression that compared to other players around 20 kyu, people who played Igowin before were stronger at infighting while having a weaker game development. Working on those areas will give a very visible and quick improvement of the game.



This is a copy of the living page "Rank - as given by Igowin" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2003 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.