Talk:Komi (Go)

Fairness

With Komi of whatever value, that means that throughout much playing, people have decided that it is not fair and thus must give compensation to the second player. Unlike games like Connect6, where it is supposed to be fair without any handicaps or compensations. I think the Komi if there should be one at all should be even, not allowing for that "less chance of draw" thing. If a game is to be fair, the Komi should be an integer so that a person that is of equal skill will tie and not lose because he/she has .5 less points from second move disadvantage. 70.111.224.85 21:31, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

I think this would be true only if the players approached very close to the level "There is a komi with which I am almost always able to achieve at least a draw regardless of whether I am black or white". I think this is not the case even with the world's strongest players - and that therefore this "disadvantage" of non-integer komi is absolutely negligible.

(People are NOT absolutely sure what the fair komi is, but even if they were sure through observing very many games, it would still be true that changing komi changes the probability of victory only very little, because most games are won by much more than 1 point (escpecially if the players are not absolute experts.)

On the other hand, the advantage that the game can almost never be a draw is very handy in tournaments.

--Pavel Jelinek 18:25, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

It's handy in knockout tournaments. Longitude2 (talk) 21:56, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

A completly fair solution to Black's advantage would be to play two games simutainously against your opponent, with colours switched in the second game. The scores from the two games for each player are added, and the player with most points wins.

I don't know how tournament structure is organized, but white has a distinct advantage in chess, which is mitigated by having players play multiple games and switching sides to determine matches. What prevents this in the Go world?-- Jason Espinosa 01:23, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

In the professional world this would mean white losing about 90% of the games, therefore it doesn't occur.--ZincBelief 10:21, 11 April 2007 (UTC)