captives
Proponent stones are removed from the board when all their liberties have been occupied by opponent stones. The diagram shows three white groups ready for capture by playing a black stone on each last liberty marked with a cross. Under Japanese rules, a captive stone counts as one point as does a space i.e. a vacant intersection qualifying as territory. At the end of the game, stones that neither can form two eyes nor are in seki, are removed from the board as captives without further ado. Under the more logical Chinese rules, stones and spaces are counted, but removed captives are ignored. Perhaps counter-intuitively, this usually gives the same margin of victory, give or take a point, as for Japanese counting. |
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