Territory Scoring

Territory scoring is used in Japanese and Korean rules, as well as in many other countries in the world and on many online go servers. At the end of play dead stones are removed from the board and added to the prisoners. Each player's score is the sum of her territory plus prisoners.

Traditionally, empty points in seki are not counted as territory, but some territory rule sets, such as Lasker-Maas rules and Spight rules, do count them (type 2 below).

To determine the score with territory scoring Japanese Counting is used.

Final positions and disputes about group statuses are handled in two possible ways:

1. Traditional or L/D territory scoring uses hypothetical play to analyze stopped positions and score them directly

2. "Playout" or "encore" territory scoring resolves disputes by actual continued play with pass stones

The first type corresponds to Japanese rules, with some pecularities like the necessity to exclude sekis from scoring. Resuming actual play is possible in this case as well, but is not sufficient for resolving all disputes because of potential score changes. The second type is essentially a hybrid, where the territory main phase is followed by a dispute phase with area-like characteristics (like one-sided dame or leftover dame becoming valuable, delayed mannenko resolution gaining extra points etc).

This page is derived from the scoring page. See also territory scoring versus area scoring for discussion.

See also: area scoring