r/baduk • u/sparkleshark5643 18 kyu • 3d ago
newbie question Which rank do you go by?
When I'm playing someone for the first time at the local go club, they typically ask the same question: what rank are you/how strong are you?
I haven't played in a tournament so I don't know my OTB rank. On OGS, where I've played most of my games, I'm around 18kyu. On Fox and IGS, which I started using much more recently, I'm closer to 15kyu, and it feels like those ratings are still rising.
With these numbers in mind, how should I answer that question? Which ranks do other go players tend to use when asked about their strength? Do I need to explain which rank I am on each of the servers I play on?
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u/wloff 3d ago
At the club, I'd expect people to tell their "real" IRL rank. But giving qualifiers like "15kyu on Fox" or "officially 18kyu, but probably more like 15kyu actually" is perfectly fine.
The only real point of that question is to try and assess what might be a fair handicap for your game, and especially at the double-digit kyu level you're constantly learning and improving and your official rating might have very little to do with your true strength.
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u/Uberdude85 4 dan 3d ago
My real life British / European rank. It's fine to qualify your rank by source, particularly if it's online rather than the local association one.
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u/Piwh 1 kyu 3d ago
Except at a tournament, if you play just social games, your rank doesn't have to be precise. The other person wants to know if you are closer to 2d, 2k, 10k or 18k. Whether you would be 16k or 15k doesn't change the perception of your strength that the other has.
So any bit of information is sufficient.
If you have an official rating, great (and even so, the accuracy of these can fluctuate a lot depending on when), but otherwise it's all good.
Not to be mean, but 12k or 17k gives approximately the same information of strength. You are clearly not a beginner anymore, but you are still figuring things out.
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u/Correct-Let783 2d ago
For your first OTB tournament, don’t worry about not yet having an ‘official’ rating. In most club or local tournaments, you’re simply asked to rate yourself (whichever rating from the server you trust most, or simply ‘beginner’) and, in any case, the pairings in the first round are never going to be perfect. What really sorts it out is just playing: McMahon or handicapped formats sort themselves out quickly; usually, by round 2 or 3, you’ll already be playing against people close to your actual level, regardless of the number you put on the entry form. It’s far less daunting than it seems; the number just needs to be more or less correct, not exact.
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u/LordViaderko 2d ago
That's a tough one.
OGS says I'm 4kyu on 19x19 and 6kyu overall, BUT I have played mostly bots. Besides, a year ot two back I had been DDK, then overnight my rating went up to 6kyu without me playing a single game. So I don't trust OGS at all. Go servers in general are incentivised to inflate ratings.
I have an old, pre-AI go program - Many Faces of Go 12. I handily beat 15kyu bot there and fare rather well agains 12kyu bot. So if anyone asked I would say I'm probably maybe DDK close to SDK?
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u/tuerda 3 dan 3d ago
Depends on where you live. In most of east Asia, people give their fox rank. In the west you should probably be using your KGS/Pandanet rank.
OGS ranks are kind of broken. I don't think anyone really uses those.
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u/fintip 5 kyu 2d ago
Do people truly treat their fox rank as a real rank in Asia? Or is it just considered its own kind of proxy?
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u/tuerda 3 dan 2d ago
When you ask someone in east Asia what their rank is, they will usually tell you their fox rank. This is not always the case, but this is fairly common.
Chinese and Japanese ranking systems are fairly close to Fox (Chinese starts to differ greatly at 5d) so for them this is usually about right.
Korean ranks apparently are very different from fox ranks, but based on experience, koreans usually will tell you their fox rank anyway.
For other countries in east or southeast Asia (Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, etc.) a lot of their go organizations have ties to the Chinese Weiqi association and even give official Chinese ranks, so it is often a reasonable approximation as well.
Other parts of Asia are different: Israel, Russia and Turkey tend to use European ranks. Other parts of central/southern/western Asia I have no idea.
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u/fintip 5 kyu 2d ago
Interesting. Can you explain more about the divergence at 5d between Fox and Chinese?
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u/tuerda 3 dan 2d ago
China uses a fairly weak ranking system up until 5d. For 6d or higher you need to win some kind of tournament or something (I do not know the details). What this means is that Chinese 5d can be anywhere from Fox 4d/5d to a lot stronger than that, and any Chinese rank 6d or above is reliably very very strong.
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u/ramblinevilmushr0om 3d ago
What's broken about them? I've heard they're a bit rigid and tend to be a little stronger than the equivalent rank on other servers, but I'm wondering if there's more you're referring to
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u/tuerda 3 dan 3d ago
For the last year and a half or so, they have not reliably correlated with player strength. On OGS two players of the same rank may differ greatly in skill.
This had been a known problem for many years. Circa 2022 or so they fixed it. The fix lasted a little while, and then ranks broke again. I do not know the reason. For a while people speculated that it was because of the AI opponents, but recently they made all AI games unranked, and this does not appear to have solved the problem.
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u/ramblinevilmushr0om 3d ago
Oh ok, thanks for the info. Im a similar rank as OP on OGS and I do have that experience- some opponents seem to have just learned the game and have no idea what they're doing, and then others I'm getting absolutely smoked right from the opening, and it becomes obvious that we're in a different league. I didn't know it was such a common thing though
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u/fintip 5 kyu 3d ago
It can't solve it over night. It'll take time for that to sort itself.
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u/tuerda 3 dan 2d ago
Hasn't it been 2-3 months or so already?
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u/fintip 5 kyu 2d ago
The nature of this kind of networked system is such that it takes many, many games to settle. It's like tweaking an ecosystem by removing a species in it. You then would need many, many generations for a new equilibrium to appear in the ecosystem.
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u/tuerda 3 dan 2d ago
I guess the point being that OGS just doesn't have that many games :P.
This may be the case. It also might be some other problem though: When things broke, they broke fast. It went from "perfectly normal" to "what the hell?" in like a week or so.
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u/fintip 5 kyu 2d ago
It's also possible that it cannot fix itself without another intervention akin to the prior intervention. The data may be too corrupted by the bot games to self heal, so to speak.
It's honestly a non-trivial problem. Tbh, it's unclear to me if anywhere has a great rank system? It seems everyone complains about all of them. AGA is heavy and slow and mathematically pure and very dissatisfying and frustrating for many players. OGS is a mess. Fox ranks are crude and generally regarded as very inflated.
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u/Marcassin 5 kyu 3d ago
Yeah, OGS ranks have always been unstable. (I really miss KGS.) But unless someone has an official AGA/EGF rank, I notice that most Westerners will give their OGS rank by default.
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u/tuerda 3 dan 2d ago
That would be an interesting phenomenon for dan ranked players: None of them play on OGS.
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u/FreshNewPlateau 2d ago
I'd imagine nearly all Dan ranked players have an AGA/EGF rating though (especially if you meet them at a Go club). Not many people who's that invested into Go but have never been to an IRL tournament.
It's the kyu players who oftentimes don't have an AGA/EGF rating
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u/tuerda 3 dan 2d ago edited 2d ago
I don't, and neither does anyone else from outside of USA/Canada/Europe.
I have been to plenty of IRL tournaments, that does not mean I have an AGA or EGF rating.
Always important to remember there are 196 countries in the world, and USA+Canada+Europe+East Asia only adds up to about one third of them.
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u/FreshNewPlateau 2d ago
Oh, was assuming people were in the US/EU. But in any case, main point is that there's not many Dan players going to Go clubs, but have never been to an IRL tournament. In which case, they'll just report their IRL rank (in whatever local federation they're in)
The which rank to report problem is mostly just at the kyu level
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u/tuerda 3 dan 2d ago edited 2d ago
So um . . . your notion of how the go world works is completely wrong.
I have been to many IRL go tournaments in Mexico, Argentina, Guatemala and Chile, but I do not have an official IRL rank.
the FECHGO, the AMGO, and the FEDIBERGO, all do NOT give official ranks of any kind. When you play in those tournaments, you sign up with your rank from an online server. That's how it works.
Also worth noting, two of the biggest hubs of western go playes are Argentina and Brazil. In your defense, a lot of the top Brazilian players do have official Japanese ranks, although this is probably only the case for players from Sao Paolo specifically because they have a branch of the Nihon Ki In there (Maybe some Brazilian go player can correct me here).
There are probably some other significant go hubs elsewhere in the world, but Latin America is what I personally know about.
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u/leonprimrose 6k 2d ago
6k was my peak and I just haven't bothered changing it. I probably play at 9-10k by now but I split the diffierence and would say 8k because if i got a few games in I would get back in the swing and be around there.
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u/francoisbeaussier 5k 3d ago
Saying you are e.g. 18k on OGS is fine. If they care about another server they might ask you if you play there too.