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The Art Of Resignation
    Keywords: Culture & History

There are definitely right ways and wrong ways to go about resigning a game of Go. For example, throwing the board across the room is generally seen as a bad way of resigning [1]. I've been interested in the etiquette of resignation ever since I was about 14k and began seeking out challenging games.

The novel First Kyu has a passage about "Looking for a place to resign" (can anybody provide a quote?). I think this is the most honorable way to resign a game.

I seem to remember reading that a "universal" way to resign the game is to place two stones on the board at once. Has anybody ever run into this? I wonder just how universal it is. In the past, even when the other player doesn't speak English, they invariably understand the anguished look on my face as yet another group falls apart, so the actual phrase "I resign" is almost secondary.

Just some thoughts, -- Matt Noonan

[1] As mentioned in BadHabits: Throwing The Board Against The Wall Denting The Wall And The Board Prior To Uppercutting Your Opponent


Putting two stones (sometimes more) seems to be a very universal way to resigning - I have encountered this countless times in a few places - and I resign this way as well. It breaks the language barrier.

In other instances I have encountered the opponent saying "I lose" instead. If I am not wrong the Japanese players tend to resign this way (seems that my guess is reinforced by the comic Hikaru No Go).

--unkx80


When you say put two stones on the board, do you mean play in two places or put two stones together on the edge? I wouldn't want them to think I was cheating if I played in two places ;)

--IronChefSakai


I mean putting two stones together in any part of the board. :-)

--unkx80


Sweeping the stones off the board is also an internationally understood way of resigning. ;-) -- BillSpight


As far as I know, the traditional Japanese way to resign, apart from saying in Japanese "I have lost", is to place a couple (not necessarily two, but more than one... ;-) ) of captured stones on the goban.

Ah! And please, do not forget to thank your opponent for the game after you've resigned!

--AvatarDJFlux


Keep also in mind the option of pouring your captured stones into your opponent's bowl (if you have any), that seems to be universally understood. Another bad way of resigning is to put your bowl on the board, scattering the stones, I remember reading that this happened in some famous (old) game.

--ChristianNentwich


Charles Matthews I think correct (Japanese) etiquette is to tip your prisoners gently from the lid of your bowl onto the board. This is consistent with the Japanese idea that one tidies the board only by putting one's own stones back in the bowl, moving the opponent's stones gently aside. This isn't a habit of Chinese or Korean players, though.

Matt asked for a quote from First Kyu by the late Dr. Sung-Hwa Hong. It's on the next-to-last page:

A high-ranking player, in a losing game, often plays a move that obviously does not work. On seeing the opponent to correctly respond, he resigns. This custom is commonly referred to as 'looking for a place to resign'.

BillSpight: Well, that makes a nice story. :-)

Looking for a place to resign refers to trying desperation tactics in a technically lost game. How obvious the counter is depends on the opponent. As a rule, it is obvious. However, in my experience, I have sometimes missed the obvious and have sometimes looked for a place to resign without finding it. ;-)

As Janice Kim says, "Resign while you still can."


Marco75: a Korean friend of mine (an expert player, but don't ask me what his rating was) once told me that a polite way to resign is... to play in the very corner of the board in a situation when that move makes no sense. The rationale would be that such a move is so bad that it spells "I resign".

He added an anecdote about a player, in a tournament game, playing in the 1-1 corner and his opponent insisting that he resign (and winning that argument).

Can anyone confirm that that is a Korean way to surrender?


My favoured method is to press the "Resign" button
~ian~


In my experience in Japan, the methods of resigning used were

1) saying 'I resign'

2) pouring your prisoners onto the board

3) playing on the 1-1 point

4) playing two stones

in that order; 1 & 2 being far more common than 3 and 4. My games are not at a sufficient standard, however, to feature the idea of looking for a good place to resign. I'm still at the level of making one last desperate invasion and then resigning when it doesn't work which is probably bordering on the Bad Habits - kokiri



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