White

  Difficulty: Introductory   Keywords: Go term

Chinese: 白 (bai2)
Japanese: 白 (shiro)
Korean: 백 (pek)

White is one of the two colors used to play the game of Go; the other is black.

[Diagram]

Move, stone, marked moves


Role in Game

  • plays second
  • gives handicap if necessary
  • usually played by the stronger player
  • addressed as "she" in reviews [1]
  • can receive komi to compensate for playing second
  • moves on even numbers in even games (due to playing second and because even passing is counted as a move), on odd numbers in handicap games [2] (due to playing first and because even passing is counted as a move)

Characteristics of White stones

  • made of shell (better quality, expensive), glass (common), plastic (poor quality, cheap), or pixels (computer Go, online Go)
  • White numbers 180 men in some rulesets, an indefinite number in others
  • Between 6mm and 10mm thick
  • Smaller diameter than black stones, yet appear to be the same size

See also

Footnotes

[1] Convention on SL.

[2] hotcoffee: Is this strictly true? I'm sure I've seen notation conventions that list white's first move in a handicap game as move 2.

Bob McGuigan: In most books I've seen the black handicap stones are not considered moves and white's first move is move number 1. I think some computer go clients may play the handicap stones as consecutive moves, but I don't know what they do with move numbers.


This is a copy of the living page "White" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2005 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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