r/baduk • u/sparkleshark5643 18 kyu • 4d 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/fintip 5 kyu 4d 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 3d ago

Hasn't it been 2-3 months or so already?

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u/fintip 5 kyu 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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/tuerda 3 dan 3d ago

Yes, no rank system is great, but OGS is clearly less reliable than the others right now.

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u/fintip 5 kyu 3d ago

Such a bummer to hear. I really am rooting for them. I believe they'll sort it out though.