A short introduction to OGS

Hi everyone,

From now on I'm going to keep you up to date with all interesting happenings at OGS. However, I think some of you don't know much about this server. Therefore I'll give you a short introduction.

OGS is a round based server. That means you don't have some hours and minutes to play, but days and hours. A standard time setting on OGS is Fischer time with 5 days + 1 day up to a maximum of 7 days thinking time. With this time setting you're able to play opponents, who aren't online at the same time you are and you can play multiple games. To speed up things when playing e.g. sente moves you can use so called ???Conditional moves???. After your move you can save additional moves which are automatically triggered if your opponent plays a move you predicted.

Besides OGS has a system which allows you to play a lot of tournaments and some of the players are only playing tournament games. Of course you can challenge other players as you do on other servers, but if you take part in the tournaments you'll find yourself at 30 simultaneous games easily. You wonder how that can be ? Well, here is a description of the possible tournament types:

Mini-tournaments are small tournaments everybody can start. The creator decides on all important settings and can either invite other players or open up the tournament to everybody. Once a tournament is finished the players get points based one their place in the tournament, the number of players and the board size. With the points from all your mini-tournaments you can get a place at the ???MT Leaderboard???. Due to the nature of this competition those who play more tournaments might get a higher place than those who have a better win percentage.

There are sixtitles which have tournaments in a 19x19 class, a 9x9 class and a Handicap-19x19 class and are played in regular periods. Depending on the tournament you're playing the rules may differ, but they all have a main tournament deciding on the challenger for the title match versus the current titleholder. The titleholder and those who did well during the tournament get little graphics next to their name, which proves their success.

The last tournament type is the ladder competition. There are three ladders, one for 19x19, one for 13x13 and one for 9x9. The rules are easy: You can challenge up to three players which are close above you and you can be challenged by up to three other players. The winner gets the ladder place of the better placed one, while the loser and those between the two lose one place.

Because of this both things, the amount of time you have to think about your moves and the seriousness of tournament games, there are a lot of interesting games and even some really big surprises. And, by the way, this server is still being developed and users can vote for features they want to see being implemented.

Of course this is only a (very) short introduction, but I'll focus on some topics during future news. I hope you'll enjoy my reports.