Ing Counting

    Keywords: Rules

This is a brief introduction to Ing's counting system. All text that follows refers to the 19 x 19 board.

Before any game using Ing's Rules, the players should ensure that there are exactly 180 black and 180 white stones each. (Note: In Chinese Rules and Japanese Rules, the number of stones is unlimited.) That is why Go sets designed for Ing's Rules have specially designed containers that will make the counting of stones easy. See [ext] here for a picture of the specially designed containers.

Also, the komi in Ing's is 8 points (compared to the 5 1/2 points commonly used under Japanese rules). If both players have the same score, which is very rare, Black would be declared the winner (so the effective komi is 7 1/2).

Ing's Rules also apply special rules on ko, please refer to Ing's Ko Rules for more information.

In any game, all neutral points must be filled before counting. In any cases where it is impossible to fill up the neutral points (e.g., shared liberties of a seki), each player will get 1/2 point for every unfilled neutral point.

The effect of the scoring under Ing rules is actually the same as Chinese scoring, as both the number of stones and the territory are taken into account. As such, there is no need to keep track of the number of prisoners during a game. All prisoners are returned to their respective containers.

[Diagram]

A completed game

This is a game taken from the 12th World Youth Goe Championship (1995), with all the neutral points filled. (The SGF files of all the games in this competition can be found [ext] here.)

[Diagram]

Black wins by 3 points

To start counting, all dead stones are removed from the board and returned to their respective containers.

Next, 4 white stones, WC, will be placed inside black's territory as komi. (Each stone placed this way is worth 2 points - reducing 1 point in black's territory, and white has 1 less stone to fill up his territory.)

Then each player will fill up his territory as far as the number of stones in the container or the size of his territory will allow. In this example, we see that black has 2 points in unfilled territory and white has 1 extra stone (with no place to fill). Hence black has won the game.

To calculate how much black has won by, the extra white stone, WS, will be placed in black's territory. As each stone is worth 2 points, and black's extra territory can contain 1 white stone and 1 unfilled point, black has won by 3 points.


Main author: unkx80


dr: When playing with handicap, clearly each stone given is a point for Black. Also, in handicap games there is typically no komi, so the extra points from handicap stones seems like salt in the wounds. For example, in a 9-stone handicap game, you can think of 8 of those stones being reverse komi in Black's favor! Is there any compensation given to White to balance this out?

dr: Ah, I found out the answer [ext] on the AGA's website, in an interpretation of the SST rules written by Janice Kim, Michael Simon and Phil Straus. In handicap games, White receives komi equivalent to the number of handicap stones placed, and wins ties. I'll clean up this page to be a bit clearer when I get a chance.


HansWalthaus: Some more examples please, this is confusing.

RobertJasiek: [ext] reference 1. [ext] reference 2. Not Fill-in Counting but also useful: [ext] reference 3.


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