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Re: Master
Posted:
Oct 12, 2026, 10:47 PM
Technically over 1900 rating. But this is not reality. There are various game awareness levels masters climb in. And achievements. Which would be a long book read if we wrote one. Then there are grand masters. A whole nother topic. Which gets murky without norms as in chess.
Scire hostis animum - Intelligere ludum - Nosce te ipsum - Prima moventur conciliat - Nolite errare
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Re: Master
Posted:
Oct 12, 2026, 11:03 PM
For the purposes of qualifying for the Masters tournaments hosted here: >1800 rating.
Highest rating class/color on this site: >1900 rating.
Top players will give you varying answers on what defines a master. My personal, arbitrary definition is a sustained rating >2000 on a site with a strong playing pool (pente.org certainly qualifies), plus winning a tournament with at least two other masters competing.
It's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.
In Renju, Go, Shogi, Karate, ... there is a simple answer: achieving 1st dan means you are a master.
These sports feature kyu/dan system - different for each sport in details but having a lot of common things as well.
In Renju kyu/dan systems are national. They are not unified to an international system but still they work just fine. There are two approaches: based on different successes on a different level tournaments (lets say, Japanese approach) and based on statistics with other players with kyus and dans (let's say, ex-Soviet approach).
For the Japanese system, Pente doesn't have enough levels of tournaments. Amateurs - regular - masters vs local club - city - region - national - continental - WC, some of them split into qualification+final event.
Ex-Soviet system is easy to implement. It will ignore SE/DE tournaments due to low quantity of games for most participants, but it may be used for RR tournaments (Swiss as well). It seems there is a lot of those in site history.
Also, it is possible to mix those system: for example, awards some high kyu for winning masters/a bit lower kyu for qualifying into masters' finals/lower kyu for winning regular tournament, etc.
Well, it's a big feature so I doubt Rainwolf is going to implement it but the algorythm itself is very simple.
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Re: Master
Posted:
Oct 14, 2026, 9:40 AM
Realistically, I think here, strongest players who have been around many years can do assessment of other players. Strongest players can see specific strengths and weaknesses of other players if looked at close enough.
In the past, nosovs was top player. He had his way of deciding other top players status. Jayhawklov made a yearly top 50 players list. I think it was 50. Then he stopped. And I think karl briefly took over.
Are any of these perfect? No. But its the methods we had.
At top levels, players like me and Karl may never reach nosovs strength level. But we are pretty high up there. When we discuss pente, we generally have a mutual vision of the game. And generally both agree on how we see other players below our level who see slightly less. We notice what they fail to see. Its easy to view players below you and know why that is. And its easy to know a stronger player is better than you. Although you may be perplexed how they do it. You know what you know. You know what you dont know. But you dont know what you dont know. And its hard to draw a clear line of, now a master, and now a grand master. I know nosovs was a grand master. And I wont reach his exact level. But im unsure if I too can reach the grand master border line. Or did I already? Its unclear to me. And perhaps will always be.
As to owen. He is newish here. From renju. He doesnt know the openings history deeply as a result. He's strong. Generally faces lower level players. But in tourney puts up a strong fight. But also lost his p1 vs mumix. He is good at finding p1 false wins in the db. But, in any event. I havnt enough data yet to form a firm opinion of his playing.
*** update. Owen private messaged me to say he plays masters in swap2 and that i should look at those. And challenged me to rated sets as long as i dont use standard lines.
For me this is part of the issue. All masters and grand masters have proven them selves on standard lines as well as non standard. Owen frequently requests players to NOT use strong P1 opening responses. This is unothodox. And makes him difficult to assess. I have no doubt that he is at some sort of master level. As to which level, its difficult to determine currently. This is in no way an insult to Owen. Its merely me expressing my trouble to rate him, given odd data.
Scire hostis animum - Intelligere ludum - Nosce te ipsum - Prima moventur conciliat - Nolite errare
