I thought I had put up a post re: pente for points variant here but I'm not seeing it. Just as well- now after further thought I believe I can make a very effective case for it. I read one of Tom Braunlich's books many years ago and remember seeing it mentioned, but not paying too much attention at the time. Here are my thoughts: I agree with Virag that long rules changes are what are needed: Tournament rules lasted us 20 years. Gary has said that white still has a moderate advantage in tournament rules; no one knows the exact value of this advantage, but it is doubtless greater than the advantage for white in chess. Consider- most chess games between top players are draws! There are no draws in pente (except by agreement; show me a 19X19 board filled with stones without a win for either side and I'd say it's either a joke- neither player was trying to win or it's a GO game) so what is currently happening in pente tournaments is that top players of equal strength are trading wins depending on who is white a significant amount of the time. Obviously, for top players this is unacceptable in tournament play- hence the proposed rules changes. Although the rules changes proposed are interesting and no doubt fairly easy for top level players (swap options), to me they create a further striation between players. Look at it this way- in order for one player to place four stones on the board and offer to play from either side s/he must be fairly confident of being able to have close to a 50% chance from either position. I contend that most players of pente are not at the level where that is an easy thing for them to be confident of. Most over the board players won't have an opening book at hand yet, I suspect, so when they learn to play it will be with current tournament rules most likely. Eventually they may graduate to D pente, but it may not be an easy transition.
My proposal: reverse engineer a point system for pente games based on analysis of games played and fine tune it as needed. Here is what I think it might look like- 25 points per stone captured, 50 points per tessera or for a 3_1 or 1_3_1 game, winner gets some points based on the number of moves it takes to win: one possibility for this would be something like 30-x where x=# of moves. Loser's points are only counted up to winner's points -1. A match is played until the end of a game in which one or both player's scores exceed 1000 points. The above numbers are just for purpose of example. By looking at games already played in tournament rules, keryo, no restrictions pente and other variants values for these games could be determined based primarily on close games between top players. Why go through all this trouble? 1.It would quickly allow the relative value of player one's advantage to be numerically defined for each game so that it could be eliminated by factoring it into the score!! You read that right; if we can figure this out we can play pente evenly with no opening move restrictions! : If two players are of relatively equal strength in a game it should be the average value of the difference between the winner's score and the loser's score if an odd number of games are played. 2. It would allow players of different ability to play against each other by enabling a method of handicapping the stronger player. A very strong player could perhaps spot a beginner 5 or 6 hundred points and have an interesting match. 3. It would change as little as possible about the feeling of each game, since the scoring system would be based on games already played without it and how close they appear games would not suddenly have to evolve in new direction in order to nullify the player one (or two advantage). 4. It would make players fight games out to the bitter end from a losing position so that they could have a closer score. This would make games between top players more accessible to novices: if a top player sees a forced win in 5 moves and feels that his opponent will surely see it, he currently has no incentive to play the game out and may resign. A novice studying the game may well not see the win easily (unless the game has commentary attached). 5. A more effective rating system can be established for pente players. Example: if two top level players should come to this site and only play against each other in tournament rules swapping games trading games for 100 games there would be no way for the current rating system to distinguish between their abilities in the game. Let's say one player knows the lines so well that s/he never makes an error and always finds the quickest and surest route to victory. The second player obviously has a very good grasp of the game as well in order to trade games with the master, but in perhaps one tenth of the games s/he makes an unnecessary move or two which nonetheless do not affect the outcome of the game(win for white). If 1/10th of these tactical errors throw the game to black, then one could look at the rankings of these players for months without noticing the difference in skill level between them. With my proposal it would become apparent as soon as the weaker player made a tactical error in a match of 5 or so games whether or not the error was enough to throw the game: i.e. the stronger player can demonstrate that a forced win situation existed in 6 moves while it took the weaker player 8 moves to come to a win. It might not affect the ranking immediately, but the master would immediately know he was the stronger player. Sorry for extreme length of post, but now I've made my case. I don't object to other variants being tried and tested, but I feel this one has the most potential to turn pente and its variants into "the board player's duplicate bridge" i.e. an extremely popular game of mental skill where players of similar and/ordifferent abilities can compete against each other for fun and/or money. Of course the will be downsides to this idea; the amount of effort involved to find accurate evaluations and equations would probably be considerable to say the least. There might be less incentive to explore the outer reaches, once it becomes possible to play evenly without restrictions. My sense though, is that if it is feasible, even if it takes a few years to put into place, it would be worth the effort to improve the game, because the game would really be sooo much better if it could be evened up. Remember, finding an opening book where player 1 wins 50% of the games is not exactly an easy task either- I suspect that those lines have been explored by relatively few players, since it is to their advantage to play from a positional advantage :~) Only when we have many players playing those lines may we come to realize that they are not as even as they seemed given correct play. Then other positions have to be found, etc., etc. It could be a long journey just to find out that there are really only one or two positions which offer an equal chance. Sorry, I'll shut up now.