I was reading about the points system in the Oteai today, and came across an interesting point under discussion of proposals to change the points.

Pros were discussing the value of first move anywhere and first move as a handicap stone, and also the difference between dan grades.

Cutting it all down to the essentials, first move with free placement was assumed to be worth either 10 or 12 points. That's a little bit less than nowadays, but opinions were no doubt influenced by the fact there was no komi and Black was therefore typically having to face a particularly energetic White player.

More interesting is the belief that having to place initial moves on handicap points (2 and 3 stone games were then played in the Oteai) reduced the value of the handicap stones to from 10 to 8 or 12 to 10 points. This was 1930, so was before the New Fuseki revolution, and when first move at the star point was still the province of Meijins like Shuei.

As to the difference between dans, it was assumed to be 3 points. I was intrigued by this as I was wondering recently whether a useful way of assessing a person's grade was to ask what difference would constitute a close game. At the very highest it would be 1 point either way (or 1-point/jigo under the old system). My intuition is then that a 5-dan amateur would call a range of 5-6 points a close game (i.e. resignable), and a 1-dan 10-12 points and a 9-kyu 15-16 points.

Just in passing, while feeling my normal jadedness when looking at numbers (compounded by arrival of the gas bill), the mood was lifted during the same trawl through old stuff as it brought me discovery of a previously unknown game by Go Seigen. From 1929 it is his first known game giving handicaps. I hope you're reading this, T Mark!

Interesting idea! Do I understand correctly that you mean the score at the end of the game, or the assessment of the score at some arbitrary point during the game? If you mean at the end, I (1 dan or so) would not regard 10 points as close. I've certainly resigned games where I'm a couple of points behind. This presumes it's a sufficiently slow game for me to take care with the counting, and the game is late enough that there are no realistic opportunities for endgame tesuji's or blunders. I'd also be surprised if a 5 dan thought a 5 point margin was close.

Note that I didn't say "margin". I said "range", so it could be 0 to +5, -2.5 to +2.5, 0 to -5, etc. On the basis that a reasonably accurate count can be made, but the actual result remains in doubt, I think we can infer that the stage to apply this would be early endgame (which is the point at which pro commentaries most often offer an estimate, too). All of this is pure hypothesis, of course, but I suspect we'd all agree that weaker players play on with bigger score gaps than stronger players. In fact, I've long observed that Japanese amateurs tend to resign far earlier than western players, and I came to the tentative conclusion that this was to save face: the closer the game in which you resign the stronger you must be!

I looked at Sakata Eio games and said if a player that strong would play out 20+ pt losses (in slower games), as a weak amateur I should feel no real reason to resign closer games with times that make it hard to count accurately.

Sakata was famous for not resigning. He once played out a lost game because, he said, he wanted to see how much six mistakes in a row cost him. (He lost by six points.)

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Very small mistakes.

And yes, I knew he was famous for not resigning. That is one reason I figured amateurs getting upset when people don't resign down by 10 may be a bit too serious.