Zen Garden
Swiss (from the French speaking part) but now living in England.
I am a relative newcomer to Go. I occasionally play on the DGS as "Zengarden", currently 7 Kyu (December 2010) and on the DGS but hoping to rise a little further by the end of 2011- but I think there is quite a gap between 7 kyu and 5 Kyu...
I've known about the game for many years but have only started exploring it seriously for the past few years. When I was about 16 (many more years ago than I care to think about!) my mother bought me a set but back in the early 70s, there were hardly any Go books, so my sister and I read the instructions that came with the set, had a few rather crude games and then put the set away, preferring chess instead.
Work takes me to Japan on a regular basis and the wonderfully old-fashioned hotel I stay at (the Okura in Toranomon district) has a good bookshop with some intelligent go books and a Go centre. Later I found out that the original owner of the hotel was the Baron Okura, a wealthy figure who was an active patron of Go scene before the second world war and up to his death in 1963. I got more and more interested in Go, although Chess remained a very strong interest. The books I found in Tokyo gradually revived my interest. I still play both games, but Go with its deep strategy, subtle manoeuvring, infinite variety is slowly but surely matching chess...
I think the entire Go playing community should thank the efforts of Richard Bozulich, John Power, T. Mark Hall and John Fairbairn for bringing Go in an accessible form to the Western public. When I first came across the game in the early 70s, there was almost no literature available: a generation later, the Western public has access to a wonderfully rich literature uncovering the beauties of this wonderful game.
I am particularly interested in Go history, especially Chinese games from the past using the cross stone opening pattern, which produces such extraordinary fighting games! I am currently studying the games of Fan Xiping and Shi Ding'an, the famous games at Danghu. If anyone has any information about these two players I would be very grateful. I have, of course, read John Fairbairn's excellent short article on the two players on the Mindzine website. More material can be found in Pecorini's pioneering 1929 book "The Game of Wei-chi", which I highly recommend as a good introduction to Go from a non-Japanese perspective; Pecorini was an Italian aristocrat working for the British customs service in China, where he got to learn to play Weiqi. I am also working (slowly) through Chen Zude's study of the games (in Chinese).