Hi r/baduk,
Kifu Master's Go Pattern Search is now live at kifumaster.org/pattern. It's something we've been working on for a long time as part of Kifu Master, a professional Go game database available on the web and Android, and we'd like to share it with the community and hear your feedback.
What it does
Place stones on the board and it instantly shows every continuation professionals have played from that position, with game counts and win rates for each move, plus the matching pro games. It's basically a Waltheri-style position search, running on Kifu Master's own database of 175,000+ professional Go games (handicap and non-19×19 games are excluded).
Everything is pre-calculated ahead of time, so results appear instantly as you place stones - there's no waiting for a server to run a search. And the whole thing stays up to date on its own: the index is rebuilt automatically every day, so pro games added to the database today are searchable tomorrow.
Two search modes:
- Board position – searches the exact whole-board position. Rotations, mirror images and colour-swapped positions are all treated as the same position, so a 3-4 opening in any corner, played by either colour, finds the same games. Built for fuseki and opening research.
- Local shape – a local pattern search for joseki and corner sequences. The search area is the window around the stones you've placed, so you can study a 3-3 invasion or a pincer variation without caring what's happening elsewhere on the board. Tenuki is counted as a continuation, use the Tenuki button at the top right of the board to see what pros did after playing elsewhere.
Other things you can do:
- Filter by era – All Games, Classic (Edo period), pre-2000 / 2000+, pre-AlphaGo (before 2016) / post-AlphaGo, last 3 years. Useful for seeing how an opening fell out of fashion or how AI changed a joseki. Games with no recorded year are still searchable and counted under "All", but they're left out of the era filters and listed after the dated games.
- Players in this position – the top Black and White players who have played a given position, with game counts and wins.
- Jump to the earliest or latest games for any position and open them in the game viewer.
- Share a position with a short link (kifumaster.org/p/…) that renders a board preview on WhatsApp, Discord and similar.
Why another pattern search?
Waltheri's pattern search is the gold standard and we've used it for years - this is not an attempt to replace it. What we wanted was a pattern search that lives inside a database we actually keep up to date: new pro games are added every day and show up in search the next day, era filters let you compare pre- and post-AlphaGo play, and positions can be shared with a single link.
Also new: Kifu Master on Android TV
The Kifu Master Android app is now available on Android TV from the Play Store (same app, same account). There's no search on the TV version - typing with a remote is no fun - so it's built around the latest pro games and your synced favourites and recent games. Mark a game on your phone or on the web and it's ready to replay on the big screen at the club or during a teaching session.
Pricing note
Pattern Search is free to use until the end of the year. From January 1, 2027 it will become a Kifu Master Premium feature, so this is a good time to try it and tell us what you'd like to see improved.
We'd love to hear what's missing, what feels off compared to Waltheri, and which features you'd use most. Bug reports are especially welcome.
kifumaster.org