Teaching

gGo supports IGS teaching games which allows to review games. Either a new empty board or an existing game can be opened and reviewed. To start a teaching game, use the "Teach" menuitem in the "Control" menu of the IGS main window.

In many reviews the teacher will make heavy usage of Undo to explain some possible variations. However, IGS does not support variations, instead an IGS teaching game utilizes only one branch, and when the teacher wants to return to the original game he will undo and erase the complete variation. gGo will keep the un-done branch and save it as variation in the SGF file. When a teaching game is observed, gGo will automatically switch into "variation mode". In this mode move navigation is disabled, but you can always clone the game with the "Edit game" button and navigate through the game in the duplicated board.

For some situations the "variation mode" is not desired, for example when observing live tournament broadcasts. These games are technically teaching games, so gGo will open them in "variation mode". But as these games have no variations and move navigation is quite useful, the user might want to revert the board back to the normal behaviour (no variations, but navigation). To do so, use the "Disable teach mode" menuitem in the "Edit menu", and the board will disable variations and enable navigation again. But this is a one-way switch. Once you have switched back to normal behaviour you cannot enable variation mode again, because any variations which might have been added meanwhile have not been saved.

Basically, for real game reviews leave the default variation mode enabled. For tournament broadcasts disable it with the menu. gGo cannot differ automatically if a teaching game is a review or a tournament broadcast, so this has to be done manually by the user.