(UPDATE: ADDED FAQ ON OCTOBER 13)
There are so many new servers coming out these days, it feels like the Go community is fragmenting.
I hope you will consider trying BetterBaduk, a new modern site for Go players.
Now you can play on the world's biggest Go servers from one place. No more waiting for games or dealing with outdated software.
Discuss your games, follow your friends, and meet other Go players on the site.
It is entirely free to play and analyze your games. If you want stronger GPU-powered analysis, you can elect to support with a small amount (either $3 or $7/month).
Let's bring the Go community back together! 🙏🦋
UPDATE (October 13)
Thanks to everyone who tried out the site! 🙏
We wrote an FAQ in response to the questions and concerns raised below.
FAQ
Does BetterBaduk store user passwords in plain text?
No, and it never has.
Then how do you log in to Go servers on behalf of users?
For OGS, BB now uses OAuth, the same kind of protocol behind "Sign in with Google": you sign in on OGS's own site and approve BetterBaduk, and OGS hands BB a token. Your OGS password never reaches BB. The OGS API supports several ways for third-party apps to authenticate (OGS API reference, OGS OAuth2 guide).
Previously, BB used a different OAuth flow that OGS also supports, the "password grant": when you linked your OGS account, BB passed your username and password to OGS once, in exchange for a token. BB kept only the token; the password was never saved or logged. Several OGS clients work this way, following OGS's examples (forum thread with a developer's example). It does mean trusting the app with your password though, and OGS, following OAuth2 guidelines, now recommends the sign-in-on-OGS flow for third-party apps. We had planned to switch, and when it became clear many of you wanted it now, we did it sooner. It is now live on the site.
Other Go servers (KGS, Pandanet/IGS, Fox) don't offer OAuth. The only way we know to connect to them on your behalf is to keep your password for that server. These passwords are stored encrypted, and they are decrypted in memory only when BB connects to that server for you. The decryption key is kept apart from the database, so a copy of the database alone doesn't reveal any passwords. Like any service that connects on your behalf though, it couldn't protect them if the server itself were fully compromised. That is why we suggest using a password for these servers that you don't use anywhere else. Unlinking a server on BB deletes its stored password immediately. Credentials for linked accounts are stripped from databases before they're backed up. If we ever needed to restore the database from a backup, users would need to re-link their external Go accounts.
How does BB keep user information safe?
The server has been hardened and audited several times using standard security practices and tools, and we review it regularly. The site's dependencies get automated weekly update checks, and the server's operating system is kept patched. More recently, we used frontier coding agents adversarially to try to gain access to the BB server, without success. We're reasonably confident that our systems are secure, and we wouldn't have released the site otherwise.
That said, no system is perfectly secure. We encourage all users to exercise common sense when selecting passwords for Go servers.
We take responsibility for our systems. If a breach ever occurs, we will email affected users as soon as possible. (One reason to use an actual email.)
What if I'm uncomfortable with BB storing my encrypted Go-server passwords?
You don't have to link those servers to use the site. You can still link your OGS account (which uses OAuth), but you won't be able to link accounts on the other Go servers. Everything else still works: game analysis, recording your games, importing positions with your camera, the pro-game library, and the social side, like following your friends' games in your feed and joining discussions.
Is BetterBaduk AI slop?
No.
Are you sure?
Pretty sure. Have a look for yourself. This site wasn't thrown together in a feverish weekend, week, or month. It has been in development since late 2024, shared among friends by word of mouth. In that time it has steadily improved and grown, thanks to the attention and suggestions of many generous friends.
In the beginning, the code was written by hand and powered by coffee. Now, we use AI agents to help with coding, as most software developers do today. That doesn't make it AI slop. It means we can fix bugs and add features faster, as if we had a bigger team. Every change goes through automated tests, and we review every change before it ships.
Does BB secretly aspire to take over the Go world, and does it hope that beloved servers like Online-Go.com will perish?
No. We're grateful for what OGS does and support it wholeheartedly.
Are you trying to make money?
No. The site is free to use. The optional supporter tiers pay for GPU analysis; they aren't there to make a profit. Development has had no outside investment.
Strong Go AIs like KataGo pair neural network with Monte Carlo tree search, and running that network fast takes a GPU. BB offers GPU-powered analysis to anyone who wants it. Many players don't have a capable GPU at hand, so they can't run open-source tools like KaTrain at full strength, or use browser-based analysis that relies on their own computer. I feel analysis on other Go sites costs more than it needs to, and I wanted high-quality analysis to be available more cheaply.
But GPUs are expensive, and they use a lot of electricity. BB's supporter tier prices are based on market prices for renting GPUs and on the electricity we measured KataGo using to analyze an average game. Compare our supporter tiers with other sites and you'll see we're not raking in profits. I'm proud of the value we provide for the cost. We don't expect the site to make a profit, but it was designed to be sustainable at scale.
Then why does BB exist?
I love to play Go, I like to have fun, and I want to engage with and learn from others while doing these things. Software can and should support these needs by bringing people together seamlessly. Online, the Go community's needs are largely met by Go servers, forums, and tools, all of them wonderful collective accomplishments of scores of passionate Go players and developers.
But I think many of us have a nagging feeling that something is still missing, and I suspect that's why so much Go software is appearing now that AI has lowered the bar and empowered ambitious folks. What is missing? BB is an attempt to explore that question. I think the answer lies somewhere in community, and fun. At this year's US Go Congress, someone told me they missed the good old days on KGS, when that was where all your buddies hung out and played. I want that community back, and I know there are others who do too. KGS is no longer the place it used to be. I have tried to interact with their development team and got the impression that they do not have the resources or inclination to maintain their server anymore. Meanwhile, OGS has a wonderful server and community with an active development team, but I feel a certain kind of spontaneous social interaction is missing, and the forums don't quite provide it. Stronger analysis there is also somewhat expensive, and I think it could be improved with more tools; I feel similarly about AI Sensei.
I had a vision of an ideal platform where people could play endlessly, study painlessly, discuss games seamlessly, and meet other passionate Go players in a social network with a Reddit-style feed, all in one place, with software designed for Go and Go players. BB falls far short of that vision, but it's a step toward it.
On the technical side, BB relies internally on universal protocols we developed to communicate with idiosyncratic Go servers. We hope to release these once they are mature enough, to give back and help others keep building tools for the Go community, following the example OGS has set over the past decade.
Wouldn’t OGS be unhappy about this?
OGS’s terms of service don’t restrict third-party or commercial use of its API, and OGS’s developers have welcomed outside clients for years. In 2016, OGS developer matburt wrote: “You are free to use it in paid apps and we do not require you to pay us any proceeds or percentage of it” (forum post). In 2024, OGS developer anoek said of third-party apps like Sente: “I don’t feel there’s any adversarial relationship… I think it’s great” (forum post). We’re extremely grateful to OGS for keeping their API open to projects like ours, and for everything they've done for the Go community.
BB isn’t part of OGS. When you play on OGS through BB, it’s an ordinary OGS game: you sign in on OGS’s own site, and the game is played on OGS’s servers. We also follow OGS’s rule against AI analysis of games in progress: users don't see any AI analysis of an OGS game until it ends.
How does the auto-match work?
When you click "Play" on BB, we send out simultaneous auto-match requests to every server that you have a linked account with using the settings you provided (sometimes to conform with other servers we use approximations of the settings). Once a match is found, we cancel the other requests automatically. If a second match lands before those cancellations take effect, BB keeps the first match and resigns the others right away.
