Jigo

    Keywords: Go term

Jigo ジゴ(持碁)is the Japanese Go term for the condition at the end of the game when both Black and White have equal territory. Before the introduction of fractional values for komi, this condition led to a drawn game (with neither side winning), so jigo is also commonly used to refer to a drawn game result. When using fractional komi, though, there will always be a winner even in the event of jigo.

'JiGo' is also the name of a suite of Go-tools being developed at [ext] http://www.joot.com/jigo/


unkx80: One of the most common form of Jigo is for a Triple Ko to occur. Another possibility for Jigo is Eternal Life. This is provided that you are not using Super Ko rule.


It is a little tricky in the way the words are carried over into English (and other western languages) from Japanese. In Japanese 'Jigo' means exactly the situation where both players have the same number of points. The game result is hikiwake, meaning a draw. The result of triple ko and other special repeating positions where the neither side will give up the repetition is mushoubu, meaning "no result".

In professional games jigo results in a true draw and is counted in the results, for example, of the ten-game matches (jubango) that Go Seigen played against all his top rivals in the 1940's and 1950's. On the other hand, mushoubu requires a replay of the game. In the 1980 Meijin tournament between Cho Chikun and Otake Hideo there was a mushoubu. If the series had gone the distance, the players would have ended up playing eight games to finish a seven-game match. -- Dave Sigaty

JF There is a very good reason for not misusing the term jigo to mean draw. It is not always a draw. In the old Meijin and some other tournaments jigo was a valid result on the board (komi was 5.0) but in the tournament it counted as a win for White.

Charles And, as John knows too, the jigo win was for tiebreak purposes less than a win: with an unexpected impact on the First Meijin League.


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