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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.)

Bart Massey, unrated rank amateur -- A potential problem with the pie rule in Go, where the range of fuseki is so wide, is that it may be an advantage to cut rather than to choose. A player with a bunch of experience with some opening move may be able to play it better than the opponent whether White or Black. In other words, the person who cuts still gets to make the opening move, and the person who chooses still has to respond. It's just two moves in a different game.

SiouxDenim There is nothing special about making the choice after the first move. On 19x19, why not have Player A play the first 10 moves for both colours? The arguments about balance still apply. I suspect the latest the choice could be allowed is at the time of the first contact play. A komi auction can still happen at the choice. My personal view is that shedding all of the opening advantage fairly in one move is unlikely, but something close to it might be possible in 5 or 6.

uxs While letting one player make the first 10 moves may make the game more even, it would also make it a different game than normal go. I don't think I would like to play that way.



This is a copy of the living page "Pie Rule" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.