How Not To Teach Go
Keywords: Theory, Humour
Let's share some anecdotes and principles illustrating the rich treasures to be mined in exploring the question of how not to teach Go. See How to Teach Go for good advice.
Vote for your favorite method!
How to teach Go badly and scare away new players:
- Criticize their moves, analyze every move. Overexplain everything and bore them to tears. + +
- Never make positive remarks, only negative ones. Newbies with positive feedback might actually feel good enough to stick around to learn. +
- Don't let your students drive the lesson. If they go where they're interested, then they won't lose interest. Your interests come before theirs! +
- Introduce the Ko rule before it comes up in real play. It's a strange rule that is only interesting because of its consequences, which newbies are too inexperienced to understand fully. Talk about threats and fights and Ing rules and SuperKo, and the game's simplicity suddenly is gone.
- unkx80: I disagree with this statement, because the ko rule is one of the fundermental rules of go. I will introduce the ko rule, simply saying if there is no such rule, and both players do not give up the ko, then the game will never end. However, I will not go into the nitty gritty details of superko.
- Drown them in new vocabulary: tesuji, komi/komidashi, fuseki, joseki, hane, moyo, aji . . .
- Talk about live and dead shapes before having seen a few full games played out. Overexplain everything. +
- Show off! Act as a performer to be watched, not as an assistant along the path to knowledge. You have plenty of knowledge that you can use to intimidate them! Use it! All of it!
- Belabor the history and minutia of the game before playing the first stone. Boredom is a great way to keep them away. Overexplain everything.
- Start them on a big 19-line board, if possible, but at least a 13-line board. A large board is more than enough to be overwhelming, and games take a really long time before newbies see the fruits of their labour at the end. A 9-line board is small enough that newbies might actually learn something about the relationship between the beginning stones and the ending territory counting, so avoid it.
- Stay on the 9-line board too long. Though it's great for teaching the basics of play, fortunately it's also good for boring your students after the 30th game. Even after they're ready to move to the 13-line, insist on the 9-line board.
- Give a too-low handicap, so they can't possibly beat you. +
- Let others kibitz the teaching. "Too many cooks spoil the pot." If the lesson is slipshod and moves haphazardly in different directions, newbies will become confused.
- Discuss strategy too much. Only emphasizing the concept of territory probably isn't enough, so to really scare them off, talk about complex situations that they're unprepared to imagine fully.
- Play psychological games outside of the game of Go: E.g.,
- When your student takes a long time to think before playing a move, play an answer very fast so he's sure he has made a mistake. When he responds very quickly to a move, think a lot before answering.
- Start off with a 19x19 Board. Give them 20 stones handicap, but don't explain anything but the raw basics. Proceed to capture all their stones. Gloat. (See "Show off!", above.)
- Start to quiz your students on Japanese go terms they can't possibly know. When they say they don't know them, respond with "Oh" and don't explain them. Begin a game and use the terms constantly. "Hmm that nozoki was aji keshi" "What's a nozoki, what's aji and what's keshi?" "Oh, you don't know? Hmm..." The key is to never explain what the terms mean while using them.
- Start speaking in Japanese during the game and never stop. Use prepared phrases like "Nan no tsumori ka yo" and "Zettee makenee ze" and add some "temee" and "onore." c.f. "Temee, nani wo shiyagaru?" Proceed to crush the beginner explaining that black going first is such a great advantage there is no way you should win playing white.
- Show them just a few basic variations of common josekis in the second lesson.
- Teach them some other game that isn't Go first. By the time they figure out that you tricked them into not learning Go, perhaps they'll give up. (Please note, this isn't guaranteed to confuse, so have a back-up plan.) -
Remember, this is a list of ways to teach Go badly. You shouldn't use these, of course, unless your goal is not to teach Go at all.