![]() StartingPoints Referenced by Homepages
|
Why I hate Komi
kokiri: I know it's only 6 1/2 points or so, but somehow, when I'm white and receiving komi, it seems as though I can play 3/4 of the game badly, be losing by 10 points on the board, then wake up, play a decent yose, and win by a couple. Take the following game below, through 40 moves, I've generated 2 weak groups, given up about 30 points of territory and don't seem to have any great prospects of my own. Fast forward to the end of the game - I've been plastered around the board by black, have failed to do anything much apart from hang onto one corner and taken about a grand total of 6 points outside the fourth line, yet with the magic 6.5 points I win by a 2.5points. I also think that, as a low kyu player, using komi is a bit of a waste of time because I don't feel good enough to take any real advantage of the first move. Alex Weldon: Uh. I disagree with this. I'm a little stronger than you, 1 dan at the Toronto Go Club, 3 kyu on KGS, but not much stronger. I find that 6.5 komi is not enough to compensate for Black's first move advantage, at my level and with my fleet-footed style of play. For instance, there's a guy at the Toronto Go Club named Harry, same rank as me, similar style. We've played a total of 10 games and EVERY time, whoever had Black won by at least 10 points on the board. 10 games is too much for that just to be fluke. So, if you think 6.5 komi is too much, you should just start playing more aggressively and play to get/keep sente. kokiri fair enough, I feel that my go (and those I play with) isn't really consistant enough for komi to really be relevant; maybe it's good practice for sometime in the future, though.
AndyPierce: For what it's worth, I think
I was a bit surprised by
Giving up the 2 stones in the corner gives some good aji for yose, and
The end: in addition to the two bottom corners, black's managed to create a decent profit on the top, and I have only one corner (albeit big) in exchange. I win by 2.5 points, but my overall feeling was that I was being pushed around a lot for most of the game, and got the 'W' as a result of a few lucky yose. I'm not saying this always happens - clearly I often play badly for the first 1/2 game and then lose by 40, but in cases like this one it just seems that the wrong player won. IlyaM: Hmm, not sure why it makes komi bad. Playing good end game is an important skill too. If your opponent got too relaxed to play end game carefully because he leads in the middle game you should rightly punish him ;) I myself played a similar game just yesterday - my opponent was leading a lot thanks for me helping him to build huge moyo and thanks for me failing to reduce him properly. But I played a slightly better end game and managed to win by 2.5 points. My opponent said after game he thought he was leading ;). BTW we played without komi because of rating difference. Probably if there was no komi in your game you'd try to play even better end game to catch up :) geno?: I think this is a definitional issue. 'komi' isn't 6.5 points, it's whatever compensates for black getting the first move, whatever makes the game even. It's usually points, but in theory it could be dancing hotties, Heian-era go master spirits, whatever. :-) If you're not getting an even game, change the komi. kokiri if I get a couple of dancing girls as komi, you can take black every time ;) Alex Weldon: I think you mean that you'll want to take Black. The dancing girls are there to distract Black. :-) geno?: Unless they perform the rare and exotic dance move known as the 'reverse komi', but the dancers have to be very flexible. 8-) Nacho: What if black is a girl?
Seriously, though, I think that if komi is irrelevant (as kokiri said somewhere), then why should you care? And if it isn't, then you have to agree that having the first move seems (statistically at least) to give an advantage to black. Maybe you could argue that komi is too low; or too high, but that's a different discussion.
DougRidgway A true fair komi will depend on the strengths and styles of the players. Some suggest using auction komi to adjust appropriately. Neil: Why should players with different styles get compensated for weaknesses? geno?: Well, they shouldn't necessarily. If your goal is to make an even game -- and at this point we have to start talking about what we mean by an even game -- then obviously we've defined the problem so as to require some sort of compensation (except in the presumably rare circumstance where the two players are exactly equal, and I'd be inclined to generalize that circumstance by calling it 'zero compensation' rather than 'no compensation'). So what is an 'even game'? Do we mean even statistically? (Over what population? Over what period in history? Et cetera.) Do we mean even between two players in some particular match? The statistical or general or black-first concept leads us to talk about komi, and the particular or specific or player-strength concept leads us to talk about handicap. The problem is that handicap is more than an order of magnitude less fine than komi, so I think people naturally want to use komi for handicapping different players if the skills are really close. "Hikaru is not a full stone less strong than Akira, just a few moku." And since the komi is defined as half of the statistical moku difference between black and white over some population (Komi Go / Discussion), it feels like it's okay to talk about one moku as some (fluctuating?) fraction of a stone. It might be useful to think of 'statistical-komi' and 'skill-komi' if you wanted to get really theoretical. Or we could say 'no komi is ever handicap; komi is always statistical' and just start talking about 13ths of a stone. Which would be cool: it would be jargony, like jewelers talking about their kind of stones in troy ounces or carats or something. :-)
Neil: I thought we were talking about the compensation for going second, not handicaps to aid weaker players. Taking the skills of the players into account makes sense if you're trying to hanidcap a game. Helping out one player against the other does not make sense in a test of skill, though. Alex Weldon: I think you're misunderstanding what Doug suggested. He doesn't mean that one player should get greater or lesser compensation depending on his style of play... the idea behind auction komi is that some pairings (like me vs. Harry at the Toronto Go Club as I mentioned higher up on this page) tend to increase/decrease the value of going first. So, for a game between Harry and me, proper komi would be over 10 points, since out of the 10 games we've played, Black always wins (regardless of who is which colour), and Black's smallest win was around 11 points (on the board). Meanwhile, other players might favour complicated fighting, which reduces the value of going first. Therefore, in a pairing between two fighting-oriented players, maybe komi should be lower. Auction komi handles this in a very natural way, by letting players pick what they think komi should be, and giving Black to the player who values it more. Neil: Everyone plays the same game. The value of going first doesn't change. I think it's an abuse of the auction idea for a player to change his bid from game to game. The only reason to have an auction, by my understanding, was to accomodate different people's opinions of the one true value of the first play. Bill: I used to think that, Neil, but I was wrong. The variability of play typically affects both the variability of the results and the median result (komi). Unless you are positing perfect play, both style and strength affect the komi. Neil: So let's stop calling it a compensation and start calling it a handicap. Bill: It's not a handicap when it is used between (roughly) equal opponents. (OC, komi can be used as a handicap or as part of one.) PS to Arno: I think there's some bug somewhere. I posted the four paragraphs above with the summary "why, the 'even game', and some epistemology", noticed the extra lines in the diff, posted a minor edit with the summary "fixing more of those mysterious extra lines? a bug?", and the primary edit vanished from Recent Changes. I had a similar problem that Hu noticed a couple of weeks ago. This is a copy of the living page "Why I hate Komi" at Sensei's Library. ![]() |