KGS Go Tutorial: Ko

Go Tutorial Index

  1. Introduction
  2. Basics
  3. Chains
  4. Liberties
  5. Captures
  6. Capture Go
  7. More on Captures
  8. Eyes
  9. Living Groups
  10. Scoring
  11. Game End
  12. Ko
  13. Play Go!
  14. Last Notes

You're almost there! There is only one more rule to go. It's the "ko" rule.

Sometimes in a go game, you get a situation where two players want to keep recapturing each other. The simplest example is like this:

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Notice that either player can capture in the middle; on the other player's turn, they can capture right back! This would go on forever, so the "ko" rule was invented to make the players continue onward.

The ko rule says that you can never make a capture that brings the board right back to where it was before. This sounds confusing, but it's easy in practice. Basically, when you see a chance to capture one stone back and forth - you can't! Instead you have to play somewhere else. Then your opponent can either fill in the capture space (saving their stone). If your opponent doesn't do this, then you are free to capture the stone because the board has changed. After this, it is your opponent who has to play somewhere else.

There are many minor variations on the ko rule that deal with more complex repeating board positions, but they almost never happen in real games, so you can just ignore them for now.

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