Welcome to all keryo-pente players and others that are interested!
I respect tonyh's and dream's oppinion that specific comments should be posted on the relevant messageboard and so i will. I've taken my time to print off and read all the previous messages on this messageboard, 2 hours further and calculating the percentages of my wins and losses, i come to the conclusion that in my case i have 97% chance of winning my black games and 90% of my white games. This also counts for my tourney games! This doesn't imply that black has a slight advantage however, it only means that i have to improve my white games.
Having played 258 regular games of which 114 with white and 128 with black makes 47.1% against 52.9%...not too far off i would say, probably because i posted more games than took out of the waitingroom...only 16 of this total i lost, of which 12 with white and 4 with black....yes also 75% on 25% as i saw Gary explaining to Walter, BUT looking at the total amount of my games played, its 75% of the total 6.25% loss that is with white....which makes 4.69% of the total. 25% of the 6.25% loss is 1.56%....of course...
I have not enough knowledge about regular or pro-pente, so I can't say that the one that begins placing the first stone has a big advantage, but i can say that for Keryo the chances are quite even...7% difference is not alot.
Dmitri...Official rules or not? Is Keryo supposed to be played on 19x19 board? the game is complicated enough on the 13x13 board!....the edge can be used, which has a advantage and a disadvantage.......advantage is that a stone(or stones) on the edge can't be defended from behind and the disadvantage is that you can make less possible combinations, therefore 99% of the games start in the middle and that makes perfectly sence to me... but if people perfer to play their first moves on one of the sides, than thats their own choice, but i am not giving them much chance to win...its the same as putting a knight in one of the first moves on the A or H-line in chess for instance.
I am not going into the subject of all the variations of pente....although the ideas are nice and might give an extra dimension to the game, i believe we first need to know how to play this version properly, before we start looking for alternatives.
Last but not least I will accept every challenge from either of you (i am already enjoying my games against Walter), whether its with white or black....the choice is yours....even when all my games are with white i still know i have a rather even chance....
Best Regards from the flying dutchman,
Dangerous Mind aka Mark.
And now its time to play some games....:)