We are going to have to agree to disagree on this. From my own experiences, some people will require you to "set up and show" regardless of board size, while others will get the idea themselves with very little prodding (again, regardless of board size).

I feel like you are advocating a "one size fits all" approach to teaching, and my personal experiences across various disciplines (as both teacher and student) tells me that this simply isn't correct. We aren't talking about a production process made up of 18 Therbligs that pumps out go players here, and that shouldn't be our goal when teaching.

I don't reject your teaching method outright, of course. I think there are great gems there that can be incorporated into a good teacher's repertoire for go. I need to explore these ideas myself and see what works in individual instances.

Why do we jump too quickly to fuseki and middle game study? Because it's fun. Why would I care if that's 'makebelief', if the beginner can't back his moves up with reading? I think it's 100x preferable that a beginner leaves being intrigued by the game then thinking its all logic puzzles if that's not their cup of tea. And don't get me wrong, most players are fine with logic puzzles. Some love that aspect. But not everybody.

Scrabble is primarily about 2-3 letter words and managing access to bonus squares. I'd never disparage a player for just wanting to play cool words.

Look at popular games: settlers of catan, dominion, ticket to ride, scrabble... most of them have better or worse moves, but rarely 'bad' moves that lose a game outright. I've seen players content to lose a game of go by 60 points with slow moves but devastated to lose by 10 from a group dying. In the fuseki a move can be wrong, but still buy you a couple points of territory. That's different than life & death where the right move lives and the wrong move loses.

Just because somebody freezes up when they have to reason out the 'right' solution, doesn't mean they can't fall in love with other aspects of Go. And if they fall deeply in love, maybe Go can help them get over that fear, and that would be one of the greatest successes I can imagine teaching Go.

There's a beautiful moment where Go clicks with somebody, sometimes 2 games in, sometimes 100 games in. They get a glimpse of this intricate system, of the beauty of the layout of stones, whatever. Suddenly it makes sense. Ok. Great. Now I can convince them of the importance of tsumego and show them the path to dan and beyond. But I just want to keep a beginner from losing interest before that point.

And frankly, if they can figure out not to eat the stones, they're not too dumb for Go. I just want to share the joy I find in the game. If they rise to 6 dan, great. If they play occasionally at 25kyu for the rest of their life, great.

L19 is a great place for self-discovery. I realized that I don't know how to play from viewtopic.php?f=10&t=10549, and now I find out that it's because I'm effectively too dumb to play

I totally disagree about “dumb” here, while strongly agreeing with your concept of learning to survive = building alive groups. It rather shows more about some discrepancy in set and setting of the people involved, perhaps of their expectations or such. There are things that can frighten us even if we are strong and intelligent people.

I think this whole thread shows that teaching Go (or better “introducing to Go”, as somebody has called it elsewhere in the forum) should probably best be “flexible”, like our play.

Even though I have my preferences for games with people who are learning Go from/with me (smaller boards first, a few rounds of Atari Go (aka Capture Go; sometimes even returning to Atari Go later, just for fun, after a “serious” game), using Handicap Stones), it all depends on “set and setting”, and in this case not only the mindset of one person but of two (or perhaps more), clearly to be seen when teaching kids. Same with Atari Go and using Handicap (aka Capture Go).

I have met people who don’t like these settings, and then I usually accommodate to their wishes. And sometimes it happens that, after some time, they concede. I dearly hope this is not because I have become unbearable when accomodating, but rather that they have understood my reasoning.

BUT anyway, I don’t view anything I said here to be a generalizable rule but rather as a statement about my personal preferences, and I guess they even say more about my teaching competence resp. incompetence.

Cordially, Tom

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Not only was your post generally great, but this bit cracked me up. This will now be my response to anyone that worries about how complex the game looks.

I apologize for the harsh reusage of that phrase: no one is too dumb to play go. I'm just being angry with teachers who throw their pupils into the vastness of the 19x19 game, blaming their falling prey to aggressive invaders on the complexity of the game. No it's the blame of omitting the basics and the makebelief of finding beauty in the randomness of killing dead groups or misreading ladders.

Read hushfield's account: laoshi repeatedly says: no go.
Perhaps i am biased by the many forum attendants screaming "why cant i improve". Surely people are allowed to find beauty in randomness. Sociable clubs are plenty. We could use a few more dojos though.

To me that sounds like a totally separate issue for the teacher than the size board they played on.

To me, a club is meant to be a sociable way to find games, not a dedicated improvement factory. When I was young (and foolish) I was a member of a chess club for about a year that probably had 100 or more members show up any given week. You were assigned a game based on your club ELO, but apart from that, there was no dedicated instruction or anything, it was a vehicle for games and the opportunity to be with other people who were interested in chess.

Now, chess doesn't suffer from the same lack of players in the general population, and with a smaller club, it makes sense that the games may be more informal. However, if your goal is improvement beyond what games like that can get you, it's on you to study or to find a teacher to help you. If you're lucky, there may be such a teacher at your club, but it seems odd to impose that obligation on all clubs.

There are certainly clubs where I live that you could think of more as go schools. Yuan Zhou, for example, has a "club" which is more of a training academy of sorts, from what I understand, but it's really an extension of his teaching and individual lessons with students. Unsurprisingly, he also charges for his lessons, and I have no objection to this. However, it's a very different animal from the other sort of club, and certainly doesn't appeal to all of the players in our area. Calling this a dojo to distinguish it from the more social club sounds like a good idea, but I certainly wouldn't want to insist that all clubs must be dojos, or vice versa.

I think it's also harder to gather the number of serious students AND strong teachers to form a dojo in any given area, and that's not going to go away until there are many more go players in the west than there are currently. In the meanwhile, I think the best way to keep new players is to have a friendly and fun atmosphere to engage with the game at the level they like and raise awareness of it. Improvement, after all, requires engagement, but the reverse isn't necessarily true.

That's the problem with page 3 of a discussion. Your arguments are often being pulled in all different directions, and it becomes hard to reiterate your point without being pulled into all the subdiscussions. I care a lot about sharing Go with people without an abstract boardgame/mathematical/computer science background, so I pulled the topic that way. But if we focus not on what Bonobo accurately termed 'introducing' Go, but on those who understand the game and actually want to improve, I suspect we're in closer agreement.

Looking at the groups that seem to produce top results, I see the following commonalities
1) There's usually a single, strong coach who expects excellence.
2) People usually pay to be there
3) There's often external, public performances: concerts, tournaments, etc.

The third parameter isn't universal, but usually the previous two points are then more true: I'm thinking here of workout instructors.

Paying seems to be surprisingly important. It kind of cements the relationship of who is in charge, and gives the teacher the leeway they need to be harsh. I think it also creates guilt in many people when they don't practice, since they're paying.

Of course pay without a coach demanding improvement doesn't seem to be sufficient (see gym memberships).

And external performances seem to be useful for adding urgency to the proceedings. Giving hard deadlines the coach can use to ratchet up the workload expected.

The viability of a paid Go dojo, though, is probably questionable in much of the world. I don't think there's enough interest to support one around me. There have been some online efforts, which some people swear by but probably isn't right for everyone.

In the dojos I've visited or read about, most of the "teaching" happens in games between students. The teacher only rarely interacts with the students one-on-one. So it seems that the main motivating factors are the students' desire to improve and the competitive drive to get ahead of the other students.

It is quite possible to have a "personal trainer" type go teacher on line. There are several pros who give on line lessons. Those have the "pay to play" motivator and the instructor who demands excellence. In my experience, though, such pro instructors tailor their expectations to the level of the student rather than demanding an essentially unattainable excellence which would be frustrating to the student.

I've known go clubs that had teaching nights in which one of the high-dan players would give public reviews of members' games or discuss joseki, etc.

But I think most amateurs don't keep up a passionate program of study. They are content to accept the slow rate of progress that comes from just playing semi-serious games.

One of the only things of merit my highschool could produce was swimmers, including a couple olympic caliber ones. I'm sure there's variance in ability to pass on technique and choose appropriate regimen among coaches, but the primary reason they were so good was that they were in the pool at 4 am before school and back at the pool after school. The students had a drive to improve and all that, but it's a very rare teenager who'll wake up at 3 am every morning with no outside motivation.

We've got 24 hours in a day and countless demands on our time. I think the great coaches are just the ones who convince us to fill the day with more of that topic. They schedule daily practices and convince us that's just the absolute bare minimum, that of course we're practicing outside of formal practice too. I found the best usually have a mix of intimidation and disappointment they use a stick, and genuine love of the subject they use as a carrot to convince you there's a reason why you're dedicating so much of your life to the topic.

So the go sensei doesn't necessarily have to review every game and pass on his wisdom formally. He just has to convince his students that they want to master go, and that the path is more study, more games, more time devoted.



So true. Instead of somebody demanding we spend more hours on Go, I think most of us have the opposite: children and spouses and bosses and teachers trying to convince us to spend less time on it =)

As someone who played their very first game a matter of minutes ago, on a 9x9 board against/with a 5 kyu opponent/teacher, I would prefer to play more games on smaller boards. Even at 9x9, I felt like I wasn't seeing almost anything going on -- or rather that I could only look at one thing at a time when three or four things were going on. Without even basic skills (or perhaps "realizations" is a better word), 9x9 feels like a big, complicated world.

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The Master said, To stuff oneself with food all day without worrying about anything, is difficult indeed! But what about weiqi players then? It is better to be one of them than to do nothing!

Manchu, Congrats.

Congrats! Welcome to the world of go, and good luck on your journey!

I think that this is an excellent point. Small boards are good for learning the building blocks of go. The point is not to learn difficult tactics. (OC, the tactics of the 9x9 can be rather difficult.)



Here is where I disagree. There is nothing wrong, and, IMO, everything right with studying all aspects of the game. Why should a beginner learn to make short extensions, which are overconcentrated, because if he makes a proper extension, he cannot kill an invasion? That attitude just encourages bad habits that become hard to break later.



Indeed. Beginners will make reading errors, anyway.



That kind of thing is not specific to go. I remember the first time I played poker in Las Vegas. While waiting for a table to open up I took an open seat at a lower limit table. In one of the first hands I played I checked (did not bet but did not fold) a good hand in an early position, and then, when somebody bet and others called, raised when my turn came around again. The dealer informed me that check-raises were not allowed at that table. Obviously, that tactic upset the minnows.

Now, if two DDKs play together and do not kill each other's groups, fine. It may not be what you or I call go, but let them enjoy their game. OTOH, I see games presented for review where both players politely make their own territory and see who wins. The main lesson they need to learn is that that is not how the game is played. The problem is not that they have learned fuseki, it is that they have learned fuseki badly. You also see a similar problem in the endgame, where players politely contest the points in between "their" territories. They share the mistaken belief that the endgame is about points. Some players even think that it is rude to play inside "their" territory.

There are (at least) a couple of ways to avoid such problems. One is to play stronger players, players who will not only invade "your" territory but also kill your groups to boot. During my first year of playing go, I don't think that I played a game where I did not lose at least one group, and usually two or three. Another is to play on small boards where life and death are often the main point of every game.



Interestingly, for me the Aha! moment was when I stopped trying to read out local fights and started playing the whole board.

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At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
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Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

For Capture Go aficionados:

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B Black to play and win
$$ ---------------
$$ | . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . X O . O . |
$$ | . . . . . . . |
$$ | . X X X X . . |
$$ | . X O O . . . |
$$ | . O . . . O . |
$$ | . . . . . . . |
$$ ---------------[/go]

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I'm looking at this and realize its really hard to not sacrifice stones =)

I also teach on a 5x5. I think I will simplify the rules as you have. The advantage to the tiny board is there is an end in site, and the rules all come into play quickly. Once you get this you can play larger boards. I am also willing to adapt to the students sometimes I have them learn capture GO first on a 9x9. I find I am still trying to learn the best way to teach GO.

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We play because we enjoy the beauty of the game, the snap and feel of real stones, and meeting interesting people. Hope to see ya there! お願いします!

Anthony

I haven't posted here in a long time and it's late at night as I post this. Thus, please forgive any imperfections in the below paragraphs.

I believe there should be groups of informal players and groups of formal players. Those in the club playing for fun should be allowed to do so unmolested. Those wanting to study Go seriously and improve their skills should have their dōjō. It would be impolite to have the serious players insist that the club players accept a formal Go curriculum and stick to it.

One characteristic not mentioned in this thread is that arts of all sorts go through a transmogrification process when being imported into a foreign culture. For instance, notice differences between traditional Japanese martial arts dōjōs and North American martial arts dōjōs. From what I understand, the former is a place where one goes to study the art on a formal basis and strictly so. In the latter, one can go to study the art seriously, but most students are there to learn for pleasure. As well, in a traditional school children are enrolled with the intention of studying the art itself, whereas in a North American style commercial school children are usually placed in what amounts to an after-school program. Of course some serious MA students come out of these, but the parents who place their children therein want a place in which they can spend time in a constructive manner until the parents get back from their day job.

For those here who may have studied an East Asian martial art in a commercial school, here is one article that explains a traditional school:
http://judoinfo.com/dalien2.htm

I think a physical Korean-style baduk dojang or something similar can succeed in North America, even if the professional Go world here is rather small; much of the sports world in North America and Europe is very much win-or-go-home. There is cut-throat competition for precious college and professional team lineup slots in American football, basketball, and other sports, so candidates train hard day and night. The aforementioned dojang can draw new students of Go, at least for a professional program, if such a format is employed, IMO.

Still, even if the student of such a school never becomes a pro, the benefits derived from cultivating Go skill, such as self-discipline and big-picture analysis, are invaluable beyond the goban. Which might be what helps Go to expand in popularity in Western countries, even if only at snail's pace.

I have learned on 19x19 board, never played a game of "atagi-Go" until I was SDK, and personally see nothing wrong with that. I have had some very good teachers, and never ever felt that 19x19 was somehow "not suitable" for me to learn on. When I got confused, I asked the teacher and my confusion was dispelled.

Everybody else who learned at that time went through the same experience, and most of us are still around kicking buts on the board.

Having said the above as an intro, you might guess that I strongly disagree with some of the stuff you say.


Most of the examples you cite are so not because of beginner-friendliness or being a better method in general, but they are rooted in some very real and specific limitations beginners display. The "throwing knives" example is the most extreme, of course, and it should be obvious why beginners are not allowed to do that in club setting. Playing soccer on small fields is a function of stamina and availability - you might not have access to large field for each training, or access to more than 10 beginners at a time, or whatnot. Small rackets and small fields are used because it takes strength and dexterity the beginner does not have to play on proper field.

On the other hand, where such physical limitations are not present, the "full featured" game is usually taught. Chess is conceptually probably the closest "western" relative to Go, and beginners sure are not taught on half board with limited number of pieces. You don't teach poker with half a deck. When teaching guitar, you might give the kid a smaller model, but it still has 6 strings. And so on...

I am not sure why there is this tendency to treat Go beginners with such kid gloves. Its almost like we try to mislead them, or lure them into our web by showing them something like 9x9 and teaching on that. Or even start with something as silly as "atari go". And then, step by little step, once they are firmly hooked (by putting time and effort into it) start "unveiling" the *real* game. After atari-go or 9x9 games - they might not even like real Go.

If I was treated like that as a beginner, I would have been offended, honestly.

Why not just say: here is the proper board, this is how you play, and you either like it or not, you're a big boy/girl.
And beginners will either like it and play it, or look for some other game which is more to their liking.

If that means some beginners will never come back - well, the game might not have been for them, or they were not ready yet. I would rather find it out now than after I spent 2 years bringing such person up to 15k or so, and then losing him/her. When I teach, I take it seriously and put a lot of effort into it, and I don't like to see this effort wasted. I see no reason any less should be expected of the student.


This is really a pile of hogpoo.
As a matter of fact, I see it as a laziness of the teacher to teach on 9x9 board rather than the proper game. The teacher willing to spend time and effort and who is considerate and sensitive can have wonderful results teaching on 19x19, usually much faster. And I believe it will also benefit in the long run.

You are correct when you say 19x19 is more complex, and beginner can get lost in that complexity. But this is why the teacher is important, to cut through this complexity and help the student along. It is not always an easy job to do that as a teacher, but this is why teaching can be so rewarding in and of itself.

On the other hand, 9x9 is a cookie-cutter method. First let me *quickly* crush you on 5 handi and maybe explain a thing or two, then go and play some other beginners while I can do more interesting things. Come back when you are ready to get *quickly* crushed on 4 stones and get few more things pointed out. Rinse, repeat. This is not teaching, this is avoidance. And 9x9 is very teacher-friendly in this respect. Lazy or mediocre teachers *love* 9x9. This is why it is so popular, and so many use it, I think.

Teaching on 19x19 takes more effort and dedication and knowledge, and so many shy away from that.

I mean - there is nothing wrong with not being a good teacher, not everybody has that skill. And there is certainly nothing wrong with recognizing that fact and admitting it. In such cases, teaching on 9x9 might the best you can do, and that's that. Better than nothing, I suppose. Heck - sometimes even good teachers don't have the time, or the will, to get invested in yet another student. So 9x9 has its place.

But I strongly disagree with the statement that it is something which is generally superior and preferable as a method. It is not!


As a matter of fact, from everything I have seen, it is the westerners (particularly the Americans) who are seemingly in love with the idea of "fast lane to mastery" - and easy way, at that. I think it is better understood in Asian that there is no real shortcuts, not when you aim at the top, and to reach mastery in any field takes years of hard work, dedication, sacrifices, and sweat.

Other than that, I agree that Asians are more studious. I think there is more respect for education by itself in Asia, both personally and in social context. In the West, education is often just seen as a means to an end, like a good career, more money, whatnot, and if you can achieve that with less education, the more the better! But this is just my personal opinion based on my personal observation, and your mileage might differ.

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