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Why Did You Start Go
Keywords: Question
A related idea: Since many of us would like Go to have more status and more followers in the West, the question to ask is: What can we do about it? Maybe the reasons that people give for learning and playing Go can give some suggestions on how to create more players. TakeNGive (10k): I first heard of Go in a novel (Shibumi) when I was about 15. Go seemed interesting, appealing to my juvenile elitism (a very bad novel, in retrospect, but I liked it then), but I found no more information on Go for years. When I was 18 or 19, in a cafe where go players congregated, I did not recognize the game. I found the players standoffish and rude, and the noise of the stones distracting. A few years later, a chance encounter with a bored mathematician finally taught me the rules of go. I found it instantly fascinating, of course, and read the books I could find, and played with everyone I could (back in that cafe; now one of the noisy, though perhaps not so standoffish). Go turned out to be much as descibed in Shibumi: wood, shell, slate; engrossing, beautiful; deep, subtle, easily misunderstood. It also is different: playing Go in no way indicates superiority as a person. What puzzles me are the many who don't fall in love with Go when they are shown it. When I work on life & death problems in a cafe, people often inquire; but it seems only those who already have heard of the game and already want to learn will sit and listen to me explain about liberties etc. (BigNose reports the same phenomenon, below.)
What to do about it (enticing more go players) -- well, the movies A Beautiful Mind and Pi have helped a lot. I get many more glances of recognition and willing learners now than a few years ago. So a tentative suggestion -- infiltrate mass media with more (and more intriguing) images of go? I have no idea how to do that, since I'm not a Hollywood scriptwriter... Meanwhile, i'll be at the cafe looking glamorous, and teaching the rules to kids at the local school. About a year ago when I was 14, I found a go set my brother had bought. He had never really played it but it cam with an instruction booket and I read it, following along by playing peices on the board. Soon I took to the computer. Discovering that Yahoo! had java go, I started to learn the points I didn't understand. It was really hard because the instruction booklet was vague and there aren't many helpful players on yahoo. Eventually I found someone willing ot spend time teaching me fine points of the game. I slowly learned all of the rules and some very basic technique. Soon I taught all of my friends and I got way into go. I started looking for clubs in my area and I was lucky enough to find one meeting at the university which was not far from my house. I started play people there from about 12kyu-3dan and got a little bit better. It took a long time to get in the hang of it. I also got friends to join me at the go club, and we still play a lot. Now that I have started playing better players, I have become very interested in go, and it is one of my biggest hobbies. DieterVerhofstadt: Just like TakeNGive, my life as a Go player started with the novel Shibumi by Trevanian. All credits go to StefanVerstraeten however, who gave me the book, taught me the game and asked me if I wanted to marry his sister. (One of these is not true). MtnViewMark: When I was about 11 or 12 a friend of my parents had a Go set in his living room. He taught me some and we played a few games now and then. Later, when I was 13 I found some Go books and a set in a study at a house where I was baby sitting. I would play through games when the kids went to bed. I then asked my parents for a Go set as a present. My mom tells this funny story of her trudging through Chinatown in New York trying to buy a Go set. I still have it. Bignose: My chronology goes roughly as follows:
Lessons learned:
Goran Siska
I found the rules in an old book that had rules to various games (card games, board games, tricks, outdoor games etc..), so I got only the most basic information on the game (the one game that was shown was on an 11x11 board featuring two beginners playing next to random moves, so that wasn't much of a help :) )
I made myself a set (no you cannot buy a go set in Slovenia even if your life depended on it!) out of Mechano set (nuts&bolts for w&b) and a printed diagram (on an old printer paper with perforations on sides :) ). Played a game with myself and fell in love.
Some 7-8 years passed till I became a student and got access to the internet. I stopped playing chess and other board games and was on a lookout for a go club. I knew the game was something special but I couldn't find anyone with more information. The second time I logged on to the internet I found a unix version of The Many Faces of Go (with no restrictions on board size :) ) and the IGS server. But before I had the nerve to log on to IGS I trained with MF and so you could say my first real teacher was MF-sensei :). In our fourth or fifth game MF made a bamboo joint connection - looked kinda weird so I started thinking about it till I realised it was a great move (I'm still fond of bamboo's :) ). I realised that in this game, you can play beautiful shapes and there's meaning behind them and that I will never stop playing it.
No. It turned out to be better :) Goran (playing for almost 10 years now and still learning, still losing and still loving every minute...) -- JanDeWit: I bumped into Go when I was about 15, tried to read 'Go for beginners' in Dutch by Iwamoto Kaoru, failed at doing that. Fastforward to the near present (10 yrs later): when I was forced to be at home due to a broken ankle, I happened across some Go links. The rest, as they say, is history... I'm not a serious player (anymore?) in any case but I like to burn a few spare brain cycles on Go. Most of my Go experiences come from playing the computer programs IgoWin, TurboGo and after a longish period of inactivity my own creation HaGo. Scartol - My neighbors down the street had a Go set stashed in with their other board games (Sorry, Risk, etc), and when we gathered there growing up, I was interested, but never cared enough to pursue it. Then, this autumn, I decided I was going to learn how to play, for crying out loud. The simple mystery of the game really appealed to me, and I decided I'd at least find out how it worked. Well, from the first few pages, I was hooked. I think that like anything, Go has to presented in an enticing way, with neophytes given just enough at first to whet their appetites, and drawn in more and more with time..
Only several months ago, last August, did I finally make an IGS account and start playing seriously. A month later, returning to school, I joined our Go club. Since doing all that, I've fallen in love with the game all over again. It turned out better than I expected, too. I've barely started actually playing, and there's still this moment in each game where I realize that I can actually focus all my attention on it and submerge myself in it, and I fall into the patterns unfolding. I'm well on my way to forming a life-long obsession. Actually, I've found it easier to convince people to begin playing after they've seen a few episodes of the anime HikaruNoGo, nowadays. And the main difficulty I've had in teaching new people is that there is no beginner mode.. and they, like I did as a child, become frustrated easily. The idea of teaching two people at once definitely sounds like a clever one. People who know me know that I play, and would be delighted to teach. And every time the Go club on campus has a demonstration, they ask to learn. Every time they go to the Sakura Matsuri and see the Go table, they ask to learn. Every time there is a reference in the media (eg. in Pi, on one episode of Andromeda, in anime, etc.), they ask to learn. Sometimes even when I tell a really bad Go joke, they ask to learn. --Regyt
Since I started playing because of a need to beat him at his own game, I felt this was worth mentioning here. This leads me to wonder - subjectively, how does it feel to improve at Go? --Regyt Jasonred Amazing... am I the only person here who was influenced by reading Hikaru No Go? unkx80: Of course not. See Hikaru no Go Junkie. Jasonred No... but in my case, I had never heard of Go before (shogi yes, from Ranma...), but it wasn't until I read like 12 and a half volumes that I decided to look up what the rules of the game actually were. One of my friends was asking me whether Go players start reading Hikaru, or Hikaru readers start playing Go. According to figures from Japan, it's the latter. ;)
I'd known of the game for a long time, but had never tried it, despite being a lover of games of all kinds. When I came to Korea to teach English, it seemed an ideal moment to start.
I was getting bored of studying the Korean language, since I'd hit a kind of plateau, and started working on improving my Go skills instead.
I thought it sounded interesting, but no more so than any other abstract strategy game. It looked cool when I watched them play it on TV, but although I understood the rules, I still didn't understand what was going on.
Not really. It wasn't until I started playing that I understood the concept of tenuki. I couldn't figure out why people on TV were abandoning local situations and playing somewhere else before the fight was (in my mind) finished. Also, maybe from playing chess and other similar games, I had the common misconception that capture was the primary concept of the game... that is, that capturing more of your opponents pieces than he did of yours would result in you having more territory at the end. My father had a go set, but he never learned how to play. Instead, we used it to play go moku (five-in-a-row.) I had never seen a real go game. When a local bookstore had a going-out-of-business sale, I found Charles Matthews' Teach Yourself Go for $6. This started my go career. However, what made me want to play the most was the San Francisco Go Club. They had a free "beginner's night" where you could drop in and learn from one of the members. Guy made learning the game fun and easy, without adding any pressure. When I returned home to Los Angeles, I had to find people to play with. The Internet wasn't promising. The players on IGS were too strong, and it was hard to get a game. Getting a good game on Yahoo was hard because the quality of play was too varied. The Santa Monica Go Club was perfect. I like the atmosphere, and I am now a regular there. I played in a few tournaments, and found that a lot of players my level were playing on the Internet on KGS. When I'm not playing at the club, I play online on KGS. I like playing there for the same reasons; KGS has a friendly atmosphere, and there are helpful stronger players. After playing a bit and being crushed by my opponents, I realized there was far more to this game than I first realized. Curiosity (and maybe a thirst for vengeance :) made me want to get better. Since it was essentially what got me started, I help teach a beginner's night at the Santa Monica Go Club. I hope that someday, someone will post that our beginner's night was the reason that they started to play go. MikeNoGo: Jasonred, you are not alone. I was really excited in 1999 when I found a store that sold Weekly Shounen Jump, the Japanese manga magazine that I knew Dragon Ball ran in. I bought an issue to broaden my horizon and to use in my Japanese study. One manga in this first issue I bought was Hikaru No Go. The art caught my eye, but at this time, my Japanese was so poor that I had no idea what was going on, no idea what Go was, and no idea why this glasses-kid and this red-haired kid were putting stones on a piece of wood. The game didn't catch my curiousity quite yet, as I was more passionate about learning Japanese at the time. A year and a half later, my Japanese had improved, and I was helping my friend AK out with translating, scanning, and editing some chapters of Rurouni Kenshin for the website we were getting ready to launch. He had been getting Jump too since mid-2000, when Toriyama Akira started a new series. Two of the series we both really enjoyed (though I could hardly understand at the time) were Naruto and Hikaru No Go. He was kind enough to send me the first two HikaGo volumes that Christmas, which renewed my interest in the manga, and got me thinking about the game itself (since Hikaru was a beginner too back then). So once I noticed that they had Go on Yahoo, I looked up the rules and got AK to try to play a game with me. I had no idea what was going on, but I enjoyed it. As weeks passed, I kept having to give more and more stones to AK, though I never really played seriously or often. In spring 01, more passionate about Go than ever, I told AK "we're doing HikaGo." His response, essentially: "You mean I am. You say we but I'm the one who has to do all the work." But in any case, Toriyama's World ended up putting out HikaGo, and attracting total beginners and people who already knew about Go alike. I found out about IGS from visitors mentioning it, and in fall 01, I signed up for IGS and started getting slightly more serious. And at my horribly slow rate of progress, over a year later I'm still only 10k KGS.
I remember hearing about it a long time ago, but I never learned to play. When I went to RIT in fall of 2001, I met some guys teaching people how to play, and watched for a while.
Uhm, after playing for a while, it just kind of hooked me. When I started watching hikaru no go, it encouraged me to learn more.
I thought that the first person to play should always win, because the other player would have to bend his stones around yours, making a big arc the ultimate shape.
Nope. Its been much better. I even met my first girlfriend when she randomly stopped by the club and learned how to play. ---
My dad always had a couple cheap Go sets lying around, and even an absolutely /ancient/ Go book explaining some of the basics. He had found the game in a shop in high school, but of course, he had no one to play against. When I was about fourteen or fifteen, I picked the book up, determined to learn how to play. After all, it was Japanese, I had heard some people refer to it as having a great deal of Oriental philosophy built right in, and I was into that kind of stuff then. I gave it up after about two months. I just didn't have the attention span to stay with it, especially because I did not know any sites to play it over the Internet. Over time, I came back to it a couple times, including once at age sixteen, when my main opponent was a (very weak) program called Aigo for the Palm Pilot. About two or three months ago, I took it up again, and I'm not showing any signs of stopping, this time.
'Cause I'm a nerd.That's the kind of thing I like to do: studying obscure subjects, playing little-known games, and just generally screwing around with really weird stuff that hardly anyone has ever heard of. Go has a few distinct advantages over all the other stuff, though. It's a nearly perfect fusion of intuition and logic, for one, which appeals to my nerdly sensibilities. It's fun. It has so many possibilities that I can't possibly get bored with it. And I'll say it one more time: it's fun.
I thought it looked pretty boring. Heck, I was only four or five when I first heard about it. It was just a boring grid and some boring black and white circles. I was much more interested in chess, with its knights, castles, foot soldiers, and all the trappings of a medieval battle. Besides, in Go, it took at least four moves just to capture one piece. You got the same gratification with only one move in chess. So I played a little chess, instead.
I only started a few months ago, so every time I get stronger and see a new aspect of the game, my perspective tilts and I can read even more into the mysterious stone patterns. It gets deeper and deeper, more subtle and more exciting, every single time. Every time, the view is a more panoramic, more connected, and nothing like I expected. It's always better.
After watching 24 hours of Hikaru no Go in 4 days. At first I had serious doubts about the series. How can a series about a board game be any good or fun ? I knew the moment I started watching episode 1... and I've been hooked ever since Besides the Go Go Igo scenes after each episode are worth gold as they actually explained what was happening in the anime.
See the previous question. I think it's haunting me now. I'm craving for information about Go. How to play, how to improve, ... It makes me sad I haven't discovered this game sooner.
I only knew the the word Go from crosswordpuzzles. I never had the faintest clue what it was about. But as I don't like checkers and chess I did have my doubts about 'yet another board game'. I hereby humbly apologize to all players worldwide. ^_^
Well since I only started playing last week, and I've only seen a real goban the day before I'm not yet disappointed. But I'll let you know later on once I'm able to play a 9x9 board without a handicap. After one week I made it to 2 stones and I keep losing at one. I have a very long way to go.... (but I'm enjoying every bit of the way so far) =D
Stefan: Welcome to SL and to go, Jürgen. Make sure you use every available Jurgen: Thank you Stefan, and I will. =D I just know what to do with my Monday evenings now ^_-
Dieter: Yet another deshi from the amazing I happened to get a copy of Lasker's book Go and Go-Moku. Also, I was bored with other games. As to making it popular in the West, how is it meant? Soccer is at a level popular in the USA, but with so many other choices it will never achieve the level of baseball, football, etc. Go will be more popular, but I doubt it will ever achieve the level of poularity of Chess, Backgammon, etc. The only way is if children are exposed to Go by Go-playing parents and in schools. -- Tim Brent This is a copy of the living page "Why Did You Start Go" at Sensei's Library. ![]() |