I first learned to play Go back in university, but never got very good (it was competing with learning how to program). Many years later, shortly after the war in Ukraine started, I was looking for an activity to share with my 8-year-old son. Life was chaotic then: everyone was anxious, we were hosting a refugee lady, and I could see the stress taking a toll on him. I wanted something where it would be clear we shouldn’t be disturbed – and Go fit perfectly. We started playing, and it was fun. One of the great things about Go is its elegant handicap system, which makes it possible for players at very different levels to still enjoy a fair, challenging game.
Since then, we’ve been going to the local Go club in Warsaw, and it’s become our main hobby. We play each other almost daily, travel to tournaments (sometimes abroad), and even spend our vacations at Go summer camp.
The camp is actually a magical event. It takes place at a campsite in the middle of the Kaszuby Lake District. The conditions are spartan – you either live in a tent or a five-person cabin, and hot water is scarce. But the crowd that gathers there is incredible. Over breakfast you might get an impromptu intro to lambda calculus, in the evening you might end up in a deep philosophical conversation, or hear travel stories from far-off places, or suddenly learn way more about knitting than you thought possible. When we first went, it felt like discovering our long-lost family.
The Go community is much smaller than chess, but also far more tight-knit and welcoming. I’ve heard chess can be more cutthroat, while in Go there’s this unspoken understanding that if you drive people away, you’ll have no one left to play with.
When I travel, I like to drop in on local Go clubs. It’s always been a great experience – I especially enjoyed visiting the San Francisco Go Club in Japantown.
I play almost exclusively over the board. I prefer long, thoughtful games, and I can’t really focus the same way on a screen.
Oh, and the anime about Go, Hikaru no Go, is really good (you should watch it even if you don’t care about the game).
> [...] spend our vacations at Go summer camp. The camp is actually a magical event.
I look forward to it the whole year. I've been going there for the past 20 years and been the main organizer the last 10 years. The magic happens by itself though.
That anime is one of my favorites. The main characters are pretty anime-ish, all anime protagonists from that time look more or less the same, but the older adults (apparently Go is a bit of an old person's game in Japan) are drawn in a more naturalistic style with a lot of character.
> in Go there’s this unspoken understanding that if you drive people away, you’ll have no one left to play with.
Definitively not in online Go. I ran into some people who clearly thought racist trash-talk was a way to reduce the competition.
Also notable is Sensei's Library (https://senseis.xmp.net) which is a very old and unbelievably thorough wiki on everything Go. It's a cool place to browse even if you don't play.
I became interested in learning Go recently after watching the magnificent AlphaGo movie [1] which is free on YouTube. I highly recommend giving it a watch if you haven't already.
Unfortunately, the early moves in the game ("Joseki") are the most important. They are also the most difficult to learn.
It is essential to study these tactics in this website... if only because they are the only "ground truth" known about Go. But for rapid improvement, the only real way forward is to play lots and lots of games to learn how the early game flows. Direction of play, which side of the board is most important and other such details.
Seems like a reasonably good tutorial in terms of layout. But just pointing out: joseki and direction of play is "more important" in terms of winning. Its just damn near impossible to teach so maybe its best for beginners to ignore this incredibly important (and difficult) subject.
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To put it in perhaps more concrete terms: playing a "tactic" position may net you +10 points across a sequence of 5 moves or so. (IE: One well placed tactical move, and ~4 followup moves may capture 5 enemy stones + 5 territory simultaneously from your opponent). However, every single early-game move is worth nearly +20 points of territory if played correctly. I'm serious.
That's why when you watch top-level Go play, there's a lot of "teleporting" across the 19x19 board, searching for the most important positions. And there is also very, very loose play and possible sacrifices / aji. (Maybe its not a true sacrifice, but you'd be willing to sacrifice if the opponent over-extends).
I disagree. For very high level play, yes, opening theory matters. For beginners, rote "reading", i.e. playing out moves in one's head, matters much more.
This is an unintuitive aspect of go because it is different from virtually every other strategy game. In most strategy games, "macro" (large scale logistics) is what determines winners at all levels of play, and then at higher levels where logistics skills are similar, small-scale tactics start to discriminate winner from loser. In low-level go, you'll find "micro" (small-scale battle tactics) determine the outcome of most games.
This is because of the "teleporting" you mention. When the opponent can materialise units and start a battle anywhere they want -- including inside your base -- small-scale tactics becomes important. (I once read the analogy that "if you were able to drop a siege tank into the opponent's main base at the start of the game, micro would end up determining low level StarCraft games too" -- only players that excel at local tactics would survive to see the end game with any base worth mentioning.)
For each hour of training, exercises in reading and local tactics is what will improve your rating the most. At least for the 20 or so first grades. Someone who is good at reading will obliterate all positions of someone who only knows the more subtle aspects.
> This is an unintuitive aspect of go because it is different from virtually every other strategy game.
No, it isn't.
As a decent chess and go player I can tell you that they're both just tactics until you approach the master/dan level.
And what is strategy if not just a longer form of tactical play?
At the end of the day, strategic play is just play that sets up tactics later on.
Or, to quote Fischer:
"Tactics flow from a superior position"
The Fischer quote sounds like the opposite of what you're saying, i.e. it's a suggestion to prioritise macro over micro: "from good logistics, tactics will sort itself out".
You could read it both ways. I would say tactical opportunities flow from a better position. If you're a good enough player that exploiting your tactical opportunities is automatic - and this doesn't apply even to most grandmasters - then you can afford to spend all your energies on creating those opportunities. If you're not good enough, creating strategically better positions is of limited value.
Fuseki (opening) doesn't matter much for most players. AI confirmed that a wide variety of openings, even weird ones far removed from the usual credo, work very well. At worst you may lose a couple points in doing so, but unless you play at a high level that's negligible and will never be the reason you lost.
Joseki (corner sequences) is also not that important, and certainly not something any beginner should spend time on. In fact, a common Go proverb is to "learn Joseki and lose two stones" (get weaker). We often see beginners learning Joseki, getting confused when their opponent doesn't follow the sequence they have in mind and ultimately blundering their corner. Or they ask "how to punish that?", without realizing that many moves are good even if they are not Joseki, and there's nothing to punish.
Nitpick: The early moves in the game are called fuseki. Joseki refers to well-studied local patterns of moves and they appear through the middle game, not just in the early game.
A couple of things I love about go is that you don't need to memorize fuseki, and that applying joseki correctly is as much a matter of judgment as it is of memory.
(I am a 1 dan go player but haven't played much in the last 15 years.)
He could be thinking of shogi (though the kanji is 定跡 where joseki from go is 定石), where joseki refers to the well studied ways to play the opening of the game.
Yes, at some point when people are somewhat able to take a decent lead home the fuseki becomes important.
Before that, beginners really need to understand how to „move“ their stones, how to defend and connect their groups and how to cut and capture.
If you see a strong player win against a weak player with a large handicap it always goes down the same way: the strong player places stones all over the board such that eventually many many skirmishes appear all over the board and then she is patient to take small advantage after small advantage, manifesting groups and territories out of what looks like thin air to the other player.
At a somewhat higher amateur level and above the fuseki again loses importance and the distinguishing factor is fighting skills and judgement, fuseki and prep just becomes table stakes.
This is very different to my experience and I am wondering why. Maybe because I come from chess and can't help myself to compare it with this frame of reference. Anyway I felt that my progress up to 5k was largely driven by a better understanding of principles of plays than tactical training. As a thought experiment, I feel that its possible to adopt a very risk averse style that negates tactical complexities to the expense of many points on the board and still largely win against weaker players. It's not my experience with chess. If you suck at tactics, your elo sucks too.
Far from it, there is no need to learn any joseki before dan level. It's even counterproductive often enough ("Learn joseki, lose two stones") before the player can study why each move is joseki and whole-board implications. A lot of it makes little sense before beginning to understand thickness and influence. A 1-dan should have strong enough tactics to play reasonable corner exchanges without any joseki knowledge, and won't be losing many games because of that.
I apologize to hijack this a bit, but do you know of similarly accessible resources about chess? So far the stuff I found online is either nerdy or explaining the basic moves to the children.
Not really an answer, as I only tried it once, but there's a Chess course on Duolingo now. You can skip the very basic lessons and then it seemed to focus on positioning in openings.
Nice to see other go players here! Here are some go resources I like that I haven’t seen mentioned yet.
1. https://gomagic.org/ , it has free and paid content, and I learned a lot here.
2. The European go journal. A nice print publication, I’ve not lived in or near the Asian countries with a stronger go history so I’ve enjoyed getting printed problems and go news.
3. The “so you want to play go” book series by Jonathon Hop. I like his writing style.
My daughter has recently become obsessed with Go and now beats me half the time. I think that's good because Go helps her slow down and think before she acts.
I've been playing Go with my spouses brother for a while. He had a lot of free time to studyGo back then, I didn't. I couldn't get a single win out of him, still I enjoyed every single game.
We rarely play anymore, I should invite him over sometime :-)
I recently learned Go for the first time and I have played almost 50 games of 9x9 on Online Go Server so far. I’m finding it a lot of fun but it has been very humbling.
I learned chess in 7th or 8th grade and was easily able to get to about 700 Elo on chess.com after barely learning the rules, which is about the 60th percentile on the site. I only play a couple games a year now but can still hold my own against 1200 Elo opponents, which is in the 90th percentile.
I feel like I have put in just as much effort into learning Go. I bought a book and have been doing exercises. But I’m still in the 0.1 percentile on the site! (Yes, that’s not a typo.)
I’m sticking with it because it’s fun and that’s all that matters. But I definitely have a lot to learn.
The average FIDE elo is 1550; chess.com's average of 1200 elo is much lower because it has many beginner players, including children. The gap between those is huge--much larger than the numbers may suggest. At chess.com 1200 elo people still have terrible board vision and routinely drop pieces; by the time one reaches FIDE 1550 elo that is no longer true and people are starting to plot out complex tactics requiring accurate visualization several moves ahead.
According to the elo formula, a 700 elo player is expected to "hold their own"--draw or win--against a 1200 elo player 1 in 19 games (so they will lose 18 of 19 games), and against a 1550 elo player 1 in 134 games (so they will lose 133 out of 134 games). A 1200 elo player is expected to "hold their own" against a 1550 elo player about 1 in 18 games (they will lose 17 out of 18 games). However, the chess.com and FIDE elos are from very different pools--1200 elo at chess.com is probably equivalent to about 600-800 elo FIDE.
I love Go and have played it a lot in person, but I always struggle to get games online, even on OGS. Feels like the online community is very small compared to chess (which is now my boardgame of choice, basically for this reason). Has this changed? Are there better sites now where a beginner can find matches without waiting half an hour or more?
I like go and don't like chess, for the simple reason that getting good at chess requires a lot of memorization, while getting good at go doesn't. Having lots of openings and positions memorized to know the best moves automatically is not something that I personally find fun.
In go there are some sequences of "standard" moves (joseki) but it's highly controversial whether memorizing them even helps at all, see another thread in this same comments section.
I don't like chess, but like go. Go feels way more free form. In chess it feels like every move has been played already and has a name. I feel like I need to study up on all of it. In go there's so many possibilities, I just play something interesting and see where it takes me.
Honestly just give it a go. :)
> If you dislike chess because you don't like abstract total information strategy board games you will not like go
I think that's why I don't like chess. It seems to me that a winning strategy would be to think as far ahead as possible by enumerating all the permutations. A few heuristics exist however.
The neat thing about Go is that, whilst the winning strategy is exactly to think ahead and enumerate all possible positions, to do so is impossible. (Even the superhuman AI fudge it. They can just read farther ahead than humans.)
So to do well you have to learn how to support your reading ahead with heuristics and a feel for the game.
A famous amateur player and advocate for the game once went through all the game records of Go Seigen in order to digitize them. This means having to pore over hand-written diagrams looking for the next number in the sequence of moves. Obviously this is easier if you can guess where to look. But, if you guess them all correctly, then you are playing just as well as the old master! After spending a good few months on the task, he was a significantly better player!
Nice. As systems become more and more complicated (like real world itself) it is no longer feasible to enumerate all permutations but rather get a feel for the patterns - an intuition. A skilled intuiter (?) would know the subtle ways in which patterns emerge.
I first learned to play Go back in university, but never got very good (it was competing with learning how to program). Many years later, shortly after the war in Ukraine started, I was looking for an activity to share with my 8-year-old son. Life was chaotic then: everyone was anxious, we were hosting a refugee lady, and I could see the stress taking a toll on him. I wanted something where it would be clear we shouldn’t be disturbed – and Go fit perfectly. We started playing, and it was fun. One of the great things about Go is its elegant handicap system, which makes it possible for players at very different levels to still enjoy a fair, challenging game.
Since then, we’ve been going to the local Go club in Warsaw, and it’s become our main hobby. We play each other almost daily, travel to tournaments (sometimes abroad), and even spend our vacations at Go summer camp.
The camp is actually a magical event. It takes place at a campsite in the middle of the Kaszuby Lake District. The conditions are spartan – you either live in a tent or a five-person cabin, and hot water is scarce. But the crowd that gathers there is incredible. Over breakfast you might get an impromptu intro to lambda calculus, in the evening you might end up in a deep philosophical conversation, or hear travel stories from far-off places, or suddenly learn way more about knitting than you thought possible. When we first went, it felt like discovering our long-lost family.
The Go community is much smaller than chess, but also far more tight-knit and welcoming. I’ve heard chess can be more cutthroat, while in Go there’s this unspoken understanding that if you drive people away, you’ll have no one left to play with.
When I travel, I like to drop in on local Go clubs. It’s always been a great experience – I especially enjoyed visiting the San Francisco Go Club in Japantown.
I play almost exclusively over the board. I prefer long, thoughtful games, and I can’t really focus the same way on a screen.
Oh, and the anime about Go, Hikaru no Go, is really good (you should watch it even if you don’t care about the game).
There is no such thing as Kaszuby Lake District wtf
> [...] spend our vacations at Go summer camp. The camp is actually a magical event.
I look forward to it the whole year. I've been going there for the past 20 years and been the main organizer the last 10 years. The magic happens by itself though.
That anime is one of my favorites. The main characters are pretty anime-ish, all anime protagonists from that time look more or less the same, but the older adults (apparently Go is a bit of an old person's game in Japan) are drawn in a more naturalistic style with a lot of character.
> in Go there’s this unspoken understanding that if you drive people away, you’ll have no one left to play with.
Definitively not in online Go. I ran into some people who clearly thought racist trash-talk was a way to reduce the competition.
> Oh, and the anime about Go, Hikaru no Go, is really good (you should watch it even if you don’t care about the game).
I really enjoyed the Chinese drama adaptation of this - more so than the original anime somehow.
https://mydramalist.com/45437-qi-hun
Hikaru no Go manga is super good too. Aged very well as well. Manga/Anime from that time usually has some problematic stereotypes/scenes.
By chance I used this just a few weeks ago when I started learning to play Go. It's a pretty good resource!
Personally, my favorite tutorial I went through was The Interactive Way to Go (https://way-to-go.gitlab.io)
Also notable is Sensei's Library (https://senseis.xmp.net) which is a very old and unbelievably thorough wiki on everything Go. It's a cool place to browse even if you don't play.
Across years of play, the only game of go I won, was a win by default at inter university go in the UK when my opponent didn't show up.
I even lost the game I played with my son, teaching him the moves.
It's a great game.
I became interested in learning Go recently after watching the magnificent AlphaGo movie [1] which is free on YouTube. I highly recommend giving it a watch if you haven't already.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y
Wow, that was incredible. I cried when Lee Sedol won game 4. And his and Fan Hui's philosophical takes were remarkable.
Unfortunately, the early moves in the game ("Joseki") are the most important. They are also the most difficult to learn.
It is essential to study these tactics in this website... if only because they are the only "ground truth" known about Go. But for rapid improvement, the only real way forward is to play lots and lots of games to learn how the early game flows. Direction of play, which side of the board is most important and other such details.
Seems like a reasonably good tutorial in terms of layout. But just pointing out: joseki and direction of play is "more important" in terms of winning. Its just damn near impossible to teach so maybe its best for beginners to ignore this incredibly important (and difficult) subject.
---------
To put it in perhaps more concrete terms: playing a "tactic" position may net you +10 points across a sequence of 5 moves or so. (IE: One well placed tactical move, and ~4 followup moves may capture 5 enemy stones + 5 territory simultaneously from your opponent). However, every single early-game move is worth nearly +20 points of territory if played correctly. I'm serious.
That's why when you watch top-level Go play, there's a lot of "teleporting" across the 19x19 board, searching for the most important positions. And there is also very, very loose play and possible sacrifices / aji. (Maybe its not a true sacrifice, but you'd be willing to sacrifice if the opponent over-extends).
I disagree. For very high level play, yes, opening theory matters. For beginners, rote "reading", i.e. playing out moves in one's head, matters much more.
This is an unintuitive aspect of go because it is different from virtually every other strategy game. In most strategy games, "macro" (large scale logistics) is what determines winners at all levels of play, and then at higher levels where logistics skills are similar, small-scale tactics start to discriminate winner from loser. In low-level go, you'll find "micro" (small-scale battle tactics) determine the outcome of most games.
This is because of the "teleporting" you mention. When the opponent can materialise units and start a battle anywhere they want -- including inside your base -- small-scale tactics becomes important. (I once read the analogy that "if you were able to drop a siege tank into the opponent's main base at the start of the game, micro would end up determining low level StarCraft games too" -- only players that excel at local tactics would survive to see the end game with any base worth mentioning.)
For each hour of training, exercises in reading and local tactics is what will improve your rating the most. At least for the 20 or so first grades. Someone who is good at reading will obliterate all positions of someone who only knows the more subtle aspects.
> This is an unintuitive aspect of go because it is different from virtually every other strategy game.
No, it isn't. As a decent chess and go player I can tell you that they're both just tactics until you approach the master/dan level. And what is strategy if not just a longer form of tactical play?
At the end of the day, strategic play is just play that sets up tactics later on.
Or, to quote Fischer: "Tactics flow from a superior position"
The Fischer quote sounds like the opposite of what you're saying, i.e. it's a suggestion to prioritise macro over micro: "from good logistics, tactics will sort itself out".
You could read it both ways. I would say tactical opportunities flow from a better position. If you're a good enough player that exploiting your tactical opportunities is automatic - and this doesn't apply even to most grandmasters - then you can afford to spend all your energies on creating those opportunities. If you're not good enough, creating strategically better positions is of limited value.
Highly disagree.
Fuseki (opening) doesn't matter much for most players. AI confirmed that a wide variety of openings, even weird ones far removed from the usual credo, work very well. At worst you may lose a couple points in doing so, but unless you play at a high level that's negligible and will never be the reason you lost.
Joseki (corner sequences) is also not that important, and certainly not something any beginner should spend time on. In fact, a common Go proverb is to "learn Joseki and lose two stones" (get weaker). We often see beginners learning Joseki, getting confused when their opponent doesn't follow the sequence they have in mind and ultimately blundering their corner. Or they ask "how to punish that?", without realizing that many moves are good even if they are not Joseki, and there's nothing to punish.
Nitpick: The early moves in the game are called fuseki. Joseki refers to well-studied local patterns of moves and they appear through the middle game, not just in the early game.
A couple of things I love about go is that you don't need to memorize fuseki, and that applying joseki correctly is as much a matter of judgment as it is of memory.
(I am a 1 dan go player but haven't played much in the last 15 years.)
He could be thinking of shogi (though the kanji is 定跡 where joseki from go is 定石), where joseki refers to the well studied ways to play the opening of the game.
I don’t share that sentiment.
Yes, at some point when people are somewhat able to take a decent lead home the fuseki becomes important. Before that, beginners really need to understand how to „move“ their stones, how to defend and connect their groups and how to cut and capture.
If you see a strong player win against a weak player with a large handicap it always goes down the same way: the strong player places stones all over the board such that eventually many many skirmishes appear all over the board and then she is patient to take small advantage after small advantage, manifesting groups and territories out of what looks like thin air to the other player.
At a somewhat higher amateur level and above the fuseki again loses importance and the distinguishing factor is fighting skills and judgement, fuseki and prep just becomes table stakes.
This is very different to my experience and I am wondering why. Maybe because I come from chess and can't help myself to compare it with this frame of reference. Anyway I felt that my progress up to 5k was largely driven by a better understanding of principles of plays than tactical training. As a thought experiment, I feel that its possible to adopt a very risk averse style that negates tactical complexities to the expense of many points on the board and still largely win against weaker players. It's not my experience with chess. If you suck at tactics, your elo sucks too.
Far from it, there is no need to learn any joseki before dan level. It's even counterproductive often enough ("Learn joseki, lose two stones") before the player can study why each move is joseki and whole-board implications. A lot of it makes little sense before beginning to understand thickness and influence. A 1-dan should have strong enough tactics to play reasonable corner exchanges without any joseki knowledge, and won't be losing many games because of that.
I apologize to hijack this a bit, but do you know of similarly accessible resources about chess? So far the stuff I found online is either nerdy or explaining the basic moves to the children.
Not really an answer, as I only tried it once, but there's a Chess course on Duolingo now. You can skip the very basic lessons and then it seemed to focus on positioning in openings.
Nice to see other go players here! Here are some go resources I like that I haven’t seen mentioned yet.
1. https://gomagic.org/ , it has free and paid content, and I learned a lot here.
2. The European go journal. A nice print publication, I’ve not lived in or near the Asian countries with a stronger go history so I’ve enjoyed getting printed problems and go news.
3. The “so you want to play go” book series by Jonathon Hop. I like his writing style.
I think is the best Go tutorial to learn the rules: https://www.learn-go.net
My daughter has recently become obsessed with Go and now beats me half the time. I think that's good because Go helps her slow down and think before she acts.
I lesson I have yet to learn (along with everyone on the Fox go server, presumably)
This is pretty well made. The progression is good and there are no distractions. And best part it doesn't force you to create an account.
I've been playing Go with my spouses brother for a while. He had a lot of free time to studyGo back then, I didn't. I couldn't get a single win out of him, still I enjoyed every single game.
We rarely play anymore, I should invite him over sometime :-)
I recently learned Go for the first time and I have played almost 50 games of 9x9 on Online Go Server so far. I’m finding it a lot of fun but it has been very humbling.
I learned chess in 7th or 8th grade and was easily able to get to about 700 Elo on chess.com after barely learning the rules, which is about the 60th percentile on the site. I only play a couple games a year now but can still hold my own against 1200 Elo opponents, which is in the 90th percentile.
I feel like I have put in just as much effort into learning Go. I bought a book and have been doing exercises. But I’m still in the 0.1 percentile on the site! (Yes, that’s not a typo.)
I’m sticking with it because it’s fun and that’s all that matters. But I definitely have a lot to learn.
The average FIDE elo is 1550; chess.com's average of 1200 elo is much lower because it has many beginner players, including children. The gap between those is huge--much larger than the numbers may suggest. At chess.com 1200 elo people still have terrible board vision and routinely drop pieces; by the time one reaches FIDE 1550 elo that is no longer true and people are starting to plot out complex tactics requiring accurate visualization several moves ahead.
According to the elo formula, a 700 elo player is expected to "hold their own"--draw or win--against a 1200 elo player 1 in 19 games (so they will lose 18 of 19 games), and against a 1550 elo player 1 in 134 games (so they will lose 133 out of 134 games). A 1200 elo player is expected to "hold their own" against a 1550 elo player about 1 in 18 games (they will lose 17 out of 18 games). However, the chess.com and FIDE elos are from very different pools--1200 elo at chess.com is probably equivalent to about 600-800 elo FIDE.
> The average FIDE elo is 1550; chess.com's average of 1200 elo is much lower because it has many beginner players, including children.
Why would that lower the average elo? Elo is a conserved quantity: for you to gain points, your opponent must lose that many points, and vice versa.
So there are two obvious facts about the average rating:
1. In a closed system, the average rating can never change, not up or down, not by any infinitesimal fraction of a point.
2. In an open system, the average rating can change, but for it to go down would require players with an above-average rating to leave the system.
In the much more common scenario where beginners come in, lose a bunch of games, and then leave, the average rating will go up over time.
The skill that transfers from chess to go is reading -- "if I play here, my opponent is likely to play there, and then I will..."
why is this downvoted?
I love Go and have played it a lot in person, but I always struggle to get games online, even on OGS. Feels like the online community is very small compared to chess (which is now my boardgame of choice, basically for this reason). Has this changed? Are there better sites now where a beginner can find matches without waiting half an hour or more?
Do your settings allow for handicapped games? This increases pool of potential opponents.
There are more people on kgs and on fox go server
I wouldn't say so for KGS, especially for beginners. OGS is the go-to for western servers nowadays.
Fox, without a doubt. I recommend Weiqihubb for a quick-access app to asian servers on all platforms, with puzzles (https://walruswq.com/WeiqiHub).
Thanks, I'll check those out.
Just idly clicking through until I got to “Ko”. I had no idea Go was stateful!
It's not supposed to be stateful. The ko rule is only there to block infinite loops.
Will I like go if I don’t like chess? Chess seems too one dimensional for me if that makes sense.
I like go and don't like chess, for the simple reason that getting good at chess requires a lot of memorization, while getting good at go doesn't. Having lots of openings and positions memorized to know the best moves automatically is not something that I personally find fun.
In go there are some sequences of "standard" moves (joseki) but it's highly controversial whether memorizing them even helps at all, see another thread in this same comments section.
I don't like chess, but like go. Go feels way more free form. In chess it feels like every move has been played already and has a name. I feel like I need to study up on all of it. In go there's so many possibilities, I just play something interesting and see where it takes me. Honestly just give it a go. :)
Only one way to find out.
If you dislike chess because you don't like abstract total information strategy board games you will not like go. If you dislike chess because
- it has too many rules,
- the board is too smalll,
- the pieces move around too much, or
- it doesn't involve adversarial, collaborative construction,
or any of the other things that make go different from chess, you have a chance of liking go.
> If you dislike chess because you don't like abstract total information strategy board games you will not like go
I think that's why I don't like chess. It seems to me that a winning strategy would be to think as far ahead as possible by enumerating all the permutations. A few heuristics exist however.
The neat thing about Go is that, whilst the winning strategy is exactly to think ahead and enumerate all possible positions, to do so is impossible. (Even the superhuman AI fudge it. They can just read farther ahead than humans.)
So to do well you have to learn how to support your reading ahead with heuristics and a feel for the game.
A famous amateur player and advocate for the game once went through all the game records of Go Seigen in order to digitize them. This means having to pore over hand-written diagrams looking for the next number in the sequence of moves. Obviously this is easier if you can guess where to look. But, if you guess them all correctly, then you are playing just as well as the old master! After spending a good few months on the task, he was a significantly better player!
Nice. As systems become more and more complicated (like real world itself) it is no longer feasible to enumerate all permutations but rather get a feel for the patterns - an intuition. A skilled intuiter (?) would know the subtle ways in which patterns emerge.
Go is a great game, my wife and I always have a drive-by game going, we use 1 lid and swap it after we place a stone.
Love to see the objectively better Go on HN now and then too ;)
I know that UI!
https://lichess.org/learn
Keeps you engaged.