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Pie Rule
    Keywords: Rules

The pie rule for Go works as follows:

  • Player A plays Black's first move.
  • Player B decides whether to be Black or White.

This rule provides a way to make the game fairer without the use of komi. Although rarely used in Go, the analogous rule (in a different, but equivalent, form) is normal practice for Hex, and the rule can also be used with many other board games. The name refers to the idea of one person cutting a pie in half, and the other person choosing which half to have.

Player A should obviously aim to choose a move that is not too good (so Black doesn't have an advantage) and not too bad (so White doesn't have an advantage). There are 55 essentially different moves to choose from, and the best is probably only about 14 points better than the worst, so it's quite likely that there is at least one point which makes the game entirely fair, in the sense that it would be a jigo with best play. If not, then there's certainly a point which gets close. It's not clear, however, which point would do the trick. (In a thread on rec.games.go, Simon Goss suggested the 10-2 point, but others felt this was too good. Bill Taylor suggested 2-2.)



This is a copy of the living page "Pie Rule" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2003 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.