The Best Part About Go

   

This is a page where everybody can enter what they like best about Go.

Unkx80: The best part about Go is that players are free to play almost anywhere on the board. =)

(Sebastian:) There are so many good parts - hard to say what's the best part! Maybe it is that it appeals to my sense of shape, which raises it above a mere strategy game.

Brent: One of the things I like best about Go is its aesthetic nature. Of course the game itself -- its strategy, tactics, etc. -- is beautiful, but I am also referring simply to the arrangement of stones on the goban. Someone who knows absolutely nothing about Go, happening upon a game in progress, is quite likely to exclaim, "Wow! That looks really amazing!", or simply to stop and stare. (=

Bildstein: That it is an art, in that it takes time and patience to learn, that there is no limit, and that we can not even understand in ourselves what makes us good at it. If everyone, whether they had never played or had played for a lifetime, could play with the same skill, it would have a lot less appeal for me.

TimK: The fact that all of the interesting things in go come from emergent behavior - they are not specified in the rules. +

absorbed?: the moment when you realise the solution to a difficult problem in or out of a game.

HandOfPaper: I am a very weak player, but there is one aspect of the game that has been nice to me on both sides (losing and winning this kind of fight) recently. In go, there are things which link local aspects of the game to global ones. However, the one I have in mind can link the smallest local situation to some of the largest global ones and so can be considered a very extreme example of this. It is also such an important part of the game that there is a proverb advising players who don't like it to simply ditch the game entirely. It twists sente so completely and inimitably that the game forever marked by its importance. It provides a most ambiguous and interesting end to some tsumego problems, like those leading to RectangularSixInTheCorner, the BentFourInTheCorner, and the Carpenter's Square. And all this comes out of the only one of Go's rules which (superficially) looks the least bit artificial, though this rule arises from the necessity of avoiding an easily encountered infinite loop in gameplay. I am, of course, talking about ko.

What I like most about a good game of go is the excitement. Yeah just having fun playing... (Even if I don't play too much..:) Reuven

Malweth: That there is always something new to learn and there is always a higher level of understanding to reach. The fact that there are two ways of learning, intellectually and intuitively, that must be used in tandem. The process of learning is the reason I like go.


This is a copy of the living page "The Best Part About Go" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2005 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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