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Japanese Counting Example
Keywords: Rules
Here is an example, step by step, of Japanese Counting. The position is taken from the page Example Game.
Prior to counting: Note the territories
Strictly speaking, status and territory assessment and removal of dead stones don't actually belong to counting but to scoring.
Prior to counting: Remove the dead stones.The dead stones are removed and placed with any prisoners captured during the game. (In the lid of the stone-bowl) The points where the dead stones were are marked with circles in the diagram.
Step 1: Fill prisoners inThe prisoners are now filled into the territories of the same color. Generally, the smaller areas are filled in. The filled in prisoners are marked with a circle. Hint: Fill in small areas first.
Step 2: Rearrange areasThree of Black's stones are moved from the top of his area to the bottom. This leaves a nice rectangular area, three by five. The moved stones are shown with squares where they used to be, and circles where they were moved to. Rearranging areas makes counting easier.
Two of White's stones are moved similarly. Step 3: CountBlack has one area: 3 x 5 = 15 points. Black's score is 15. White has one area: 3 x 3 = 9 points. White's score is 9. Black is the winner. He won by 15 - 9 = 6 points. Counting in tens and twentiesI've played many, many games on-line (where scoring is trivial) but only a couple dozen or so in person. After playing a game in person, I'm often amazed at my opponent's quick re-arrangement of the stones and rapid tallying of the score. I'm sometimes afraid to touch the stones after the game ends for fear of confusing things. (Seems rude to me not to help out, but I'd rather be rude than mess up the scoring.) I wonder if anyone can comment on a technique that my Japanese and Korean friends seem to use to simplify the actual counting. I'm figuring this out as I compose this, but they appear to arrange the stones to form areas of 10 or 20 points of territory. They use two stones to indicate 10 points and 4 stones to indicate 20 points. The confusing thing is that they use stones already on the board, so a 10 point territory is actually 2x6 with two stones in the middle (and a 20 point territory is 4x6 with four stones in the middle).
So at a glance you can tell the score in this is example is white: 65, black: 50. One subtlety is that sometimes they get a little sloppy moving the stones around so that the other player's stones are sometimes used to form the borders (like the indicated stones on the left). The colors of the 2 or 4 stones in the center of the open areas indicates the owner of the territory. Do I have this right? -- RexWalters (wrex 12k on KGS)
At the top left corner is the basic "10" shape, which is very easy to recognize. Below it white has two such shapes side by side to demonstrate it. Upper right is 2 x 10. Such an area is easy to construct on the side, as you know the star point (marked) will be on the 10th row. On the right side black has yet another easily recognizable shape of 20. At the bottom the stones are in "multiples of 5" shapes. A big territory will often be easiest to count by arranging it to this kind of shape. Also, 2x5 sometimes fits where 3x4 wouldn't. Also note that when there is a large lump of stones of the same color, and elsewhere on the board are some scattered small areas (of the same color, of course), you can make a 10 size hole in the lump to fill the scattered points. There are also a couple of "tricks" to making counting easier:
or, of course, the ultimate solution:
-- Bass This is a copy of the living page "Japanese Counting Example" at Sensei's Library. ![]() |