Walter -

I think you know what Dmitri King means and you're just nitpicking words there. When I played Pente without the tournament rule at IYT because that's all they had and all that I could find at the time, in 18 tournaments, I lost 8 games. ALL EIGHT of those were as player 2 and I was LUCKY in the MANY others. Why? Because there was almost no one in those tourneys that knew how to play the game correctly! That's because most of the former players from the '80's either didn't know about the site or refused to play it without the tournament rule, because they knew it was pointless.

It's the same way for Dmitri King in Keryo Pente at www.pente.org. Sure, he's 12-4 as player 2, but that's because few people understand how to play the game right.

But what if you took Dmitri King, Istvan Virag, Dmitri Krasnonosov, Alexander Nosovsky, Scott Justice, myself, and a few others and gave us a year to completely study and understand the differences between Pente and Keryo Pente. Then you put us into a Keryo Pente tournament together.

Would player 2 EVER win without the tournament rule? Not likely, but if he did, it would be 1 in 50 and we would all be bored tying with each other the other 49 out of 50 times. Give us 3 years to perfect our game, and it would be 1 in 1000 or probably NEVER!

Right now, I would probably wager on Dmitri King beating you 5 in a row without the tourney rule as player 1 in Keryo Pente at IYT, even though I think that he has studied the game very little. I could be wrong, you could win once, but that's because the game is different enough from Pente that he made an error large enough that you could win. That's not to say that you aren't a good player, it's that player 2 is at a fairly severe disadvantage in Keryo Pente also without the opening restriction, even though that disadvantage is not quite as large as in Pente.

The points are:
1. The more you study a game, the more one-sided it is to play it without an opening restriction.
2. Why not play the games WITH the opening restriction from the time that you learn the game so that you have a more equal chance from either side, regardless of your ability?

By the way, the 'things' that they call Pente and Keryo Pente at IYT are no such games. Those games were NEVER invented to be played on a 13x13 board and the tourney rule has been in existence on them ever since the game was less than 2 years old in 1979. IYT simply screwed up when they put the games on their site to begin with and so proceeded to confuse a generation of players. Brain King has gotten it right! As I have told many people, the IYT games should be called 'Beginners (Keryo) Pente' or 'Recreational (Keryo) Pente'. Pro Pente IS the real regular Pente and they don't even have the real regular Keryo Pente!


Gary Barnes