How Scoring Works in Go
Go scoring works like this: when both players pass, you remove the stones that cannot survive, then each player counts the stones they still have on the board plus every empty point their stones surround. White adds 7.5 points of komi for moving second, and the higher total wins. That is area scoring, the method used in Chinese rules and on this site, and it means you never have to keep track of prisoners during the game.
Once both players pass in a row, the rules of Go hand you a finished board and ask: who has more? This page walks through exactly how that count works.
Area scoring, in one sentence
Your score is the number of points you control: every stone you still have on the board, plus every empty point that’s entirely surrounded by your stones and nobody else’s. Add those two numbers together, do the same for your opponent, and whoever has more wins. That’s it. This is called area scoring (sometimes “Chinese rules,” since it’s the standard in China and increasingly common worldwide), and it’s what this site uses for every game.
Notice that your own stones count toward your score, not just the empty space around them. That’s the detail that trips up people coming from Japanese-rules apps, where only empty territory is counted. See the comparison further down.
How to count territory in Go
Counting is easier than it sounds because you are not adding up 81 or 361 separate points. You are adding up a handful of rectangles.
Take one player’s side at a time. Find each enclosed empty region, count it as blocks of two or five so your eye can group them, and note the total. Then count that player’s stones on the board the same way. Add the two numbers. Repeat for the other player, add White’s komi, and compare.
Here is a finished 9x9 game, simplified so the boundary is clean.
Black’s territory comes in two blocks: five columns four rows deep on the left, which is 20 points, and four columns three rows deep on the right, which is 12. That is 32 empty points, plus the 9 stones on the board, so Black scores 41.
White’s territory is the mirror image: five columns three rows deep on the left, which is 15, and four columns four rows deep on the right, which is 16. That is 31 empty points, plus 9 stones, so White scores 40. Add 7.5 komi and White finishes on 47.5.
White wins by 6.5 points. Notice the check that comes for free: 41 plus 40 is 81, which is every point on a 9x9 board. Under area scoring, with no seki on the board, the two raw scores always add up to the size of the board, so if your two numbers don’t, you have miscounted one of them.
That check is the fastest way to count accurately by hand. Count the smaller side carefully, subtract from the board size, and you have the other side without counting it twice.
Dead stones: how you decide
Before anyone counts anything, both players agree on which stones are dead: stones that have no way to survive and would be captured if play continued, even though nobody’s bothered to physically capture them yet. Dead stones come off the board and count as if that space belongs to whoever surrounded them.
The test is the one from life and death in Go: can the group make two eyes, connect to a group that already has them, or break out into open board? If the answer to all three is no, it is dead, whoever’s turn it would have been.
On this site, after two passes the board estimates which stones are dead based on who’d win a race to fill in the surrounding area, and you can tap any group to toggle it between alive and dead if the estimate looks wrong before confirming the score. Most of the time, “dead” is obvious: a lone stone swallowed inside enemy territory with no eye shape isn’t going anywhere.
Occasionally a group is genuinely unclear. It might survive if the game kept going, or might not. If you’re not sure, the safest habit is to keep playing rather than pass: capture the stone for real, or make the eye shape solid, so there’s nothing left to argue about by the time both players pass. How a Go game ends covers what happens when two players disagree.
Filling in neutral points
Points that don’t clearly belong to either side, usually a gap right on the boundary between two frameworks, are called dame. Under area scoring, filling a dame point with your own stone is worth a real point, because your stone count goes up by one.
That’s different from Japanese or territory scoring, where dame are worth nothing and players often skip them entirely. Practically, this means it’s worth playing out the boundary fully here rather than passing early. Since the two players alternate, the dame usually split close to evenly, but an odd number of them can swing the result by a point, and with a half-point komi a single point decides games. How to play Go covers reading when a boundary is actually finished.
Komi and why it is 7.5
Black moves first, which is worth something real, so White gets a fixed number of points added at the end to even things out. That compensation is komi, and the rules of Go cover where it sits in the rule set.
The number is not arbitrary. It was 4.5 in the middle of the last century, then 5.5, then 6.5, and it kept rising because professional records showed Black still winning more than half the time at each value. Modern area-scoring rules settled on 7.5, which is what this site uses and what most Chinese and AGA events use. Japanese rules use 6.5, and the difference is partly a consequence of how the two systems count rather than a disagreement about how big Black’s advantage is. Komi explained goes into the history and the maths.
The half point exists purely to rule out a tie, since area scores are always whole numbers.
Area scoring vs territory (Japanese) scoring
If you’ve played Go elsewhere, you may have learned territory scoring instead, where you count only empty surrounded points, not your own stones, and captures during the game are added on separately at the end. In the vast majority of games, area and territory scoring produce the same winner. The two systems were designed to agree almost all the time, and the difference in final score is usually just a point or two.
The practical difference shows up mid-game. Under area scoring, playing inside your own territory to fill a dame or settle a boundary costs you nothing, since your stone count and territory count trade off exactly. Under territory scoring, the same move can cost you a point, since a stone on the board isn’t worth anything but empty territory is. This site sticks to area scoring throughout, so you don’t need to think about the difference while playing. Chinese vs Japanese rules sets the two side by side if you want the full comparison.
Counting gets easier with practice, and you don’t have to do it by hand here. The board totals the score for you once you’ve confirmed dead stones. Understanding the count is still worth it, though: it tells you what your moves are actually worth while the game’s still in progress, which is a big part of what strategy for beginners is about.
If you want to practise counting by eye, pause partway through a game against the computer and estimate each side’s stones plus surrounded space. You’ll be off by a few points at first. That gap closes fast once you’ve done it a handful of times, and it’s a good way to notice which of your moves during the game actually gained points and which just felt productive.
Frequently asked questions
Do captured stones count in area scoring?
Not directly. Prisoners sitting in a bowl are worth nothing at the end, which is why you never have to keep track of them. What a capture gives you is the empty point the stone used to occupy, which usually ends up inside your own area and gets counted there instead. Under Japanese territory scoring prisoners do count, added to your territory one point each, which is the main bookkeeping difference between the two systems.
What is a dame point?
A dame is an empty point on the border between two living groups of opposite colours, surrounded by neither, so it is territory for nobody. Under the area scoring used here, whoever plays a stone on it gains a point, so dame are filled in before either player passes. Under Japanese rules they are worth nothing to either side and are usually left empty.
Who wins a tie in Go?
With 7.5 komi, nobody, because a tie cannot happen. Both raw scores are whole numbers, so the margin is always a half point at minimum and someone is always ahead. Rule sets that use a whole number for komi can produce a genuine tie, called jigo, and they each have their own way of settling it, from declaring the game drawn to awarding it to one colour.