Hi,

I've been advised by my wife that if I reach Shodan, I can buy a Goban of my choice. I've been doing some reading, and I think I prefer Katsura wood, based on the appearance and the reviews. I'd like a Floor Goban, as I have the floorspace in my study. From my reading, Katsura is a touch harder than Kaya, so, perhaps Jitsuyo grade stones would be best, or does it not make much difference? I've read that Shin Kaya is softer, and I'm concerned that it might dint over time. I'd like to keep this in as good a condition as possible for decades, so, that's my other reason for concern on the materials. On that note, are there any covers which are recommended for the board?

I want to make sure I make a choice I'll be happy with for a long time, so, I'm willing to pay and spend the time researching. I really like what I've seen and read of Shodan Imports, however, I live in Australia, so, I need somewhere that ships here (preferably...there are ways around this which I may use if the benefits outweigh the logistical effort). Has anyone used jzool.com? They appear to carry quite a good range.

Well, that was a lot of writing! Thanks if you've made it this far!

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Jarrod, I highly recommend Kuroki Go IshiTen's Jitsuyo (Standard) grade, size 38 (10.7mm).
I found Jitsuyo's price/performance ratio to be the best; but, if you really
enjoy Yuki (Snow) grade stones -- they are very beautiful -- by all means go for them.

I prefer GoSeigen-style over Kitani-style bowls, but I have not seen
the former for a while -- perhaps they are too expensive (need a tree with
a much bigger diameter).

Good luck.

You don't define your price range, but I think you would should contact either Kiseido or Kuroki Goichi Ten or both. They both provide excellent quality equipment with reasonable prices and ship from Japan, which probably is a bit less expensive to Australia. The advantage with Kiseido is that they (Richard Bozulich) speak English, whereas doing business with Kuroki in English is not so easy, but not by any means impossible.

Take a look at:
- http://www.kiseido.com/go_equipment.htm
- http://www.kiseido.com/luxury.htm
- http://www.kurokigoishi.co.jp/english/o ... index.html
- http://www.kurokigoishi.co.jp/english/o ... index.html
- http://www.kurokigoishi.co.jp/english/o ... index.html
- http://www.kurokigoishi.co.jp/english/o ... index.html
- http://www.kurokigoishi.co.jp/english/o ... index.html
- http://www.kurokigoishi.co.jp/english/o ... index.html
- http://www.kurokigoishi.co.jp/english/o ... index.html
etc

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Kaya, shinkaya, hiba, agathis and katsura all will dent slightly from the play of stones on the surface. For what it's worth, thicker, heavier stones are more likely to dent the board surface than thinner, lighter ones. After some time the face of the board gets to looking like hammered copper or silver metal. Not the shine or color, just the pattern of dents. If you refrain from really energetic banging of stones then the dents will be very small and shallow. Some people consider this attractive, a kind of patina of use. If you were in Japan you could take your board to a go board shop to have the surface planed and refinished if the dents become bothersome. There are harder, more dent resistant woods which are used for board making but if the wood is too hard the sound is wrong and you can actually damage your finger joints from the shock of many plays of stones on the hard surface.

Something about the idea that a harder goban leads to more finger injuries seems pretty silly. I'm fairly certain that the difference in hardness isn't what would cause the injuries as much as how hard someone is slamming pieces on the board. I'm not knowledgeable about wood, but I've yet to see a piece of soft wood that wouldn't screw up my fingers if I smashed them into it's surface with great force.

Perhaps people play harder than usual because they think the wood will be more resistant to damage? I could see that as a potential cause of more injuries. I have a hard time believing that harder gobans lead to damage of phalanges or phalangeal joints.

I agree. It reminds me of the story of the Korean fingerboard.

Hi all,

Thanks for the advice Hmm...the GoSeigen bowls do seem nice. I'll make sure I keep an eye out for them. Budget...probably up to 4K for the set...but to be honest, after something I personally find attractive that is also quality...if I can get that for 2K, then I'd definitely pick that over the more expensive option Dealing with someone from a japanese language perspective isn't an issue, so, more than happy to treat both of those dealers evenly.

Good to know that they'll all dint, more or less. I was just mostly going off what I'd read on the net about shin kaya being particularly susceptible to dinting.

The Jitsuyo stones are fine to my eye, so, happy to save some cash there without feeling like I've bought something I'm not happy with!

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Perhaps "injury" is too strong. I heard about this from a Japanese pro who commented that pros don't like hard boards because after a long time finger pain could develop. Pros might play stones thousands of times in a day during study and even a slighly increase shock from playing a stone might lead to some sort of repetitive stress injury. Of course you could play stones just placing them gently on the surface, with no sound and no injury would be risked. And by violently smashing the stones down you could injure yourself on any board.

It doesn't seem unreasonable to me at all. One can easily develop a repeated stress injury in the index finger just from clicking the computer mouse all day at work. The shock from constant clicking of go stones on a board has to be sharper than that.

You'd have a hard time spending 4k on katsura. 4K will get you an awesome floor kaya set from Kuroki. He has proven himself to be quite the tastemaker, and I think the current inventory looks a bit nicer than usual. A few of the 200,000+ JPY honkaya masame and tenchimasa floor gobans he has in stock at present are really beautiful. Ask him to pair one up with a reasonable set of stones and plain island mulberry bowls and you may play on the quintessential kit. It is actually sublime. And you might have him send it by slow boat for minimum shipping cost and maximum anticipation factor.

Is it not true that a stone's strength on the board should resound with more impact than the force used to put it there? My brain hurts, not my fingers, and I can enjoy the occasional satisfying thwack without severely denting the board.

I never said that RSI for any repetitive action would be unlikely. Also I don't think it's merely 'clicking' a mouse that gives you RSI from using a computer. It's more to do with posture and ergonomics with positioning of the wrist. (If you can find a study showing increase in long term phalangeal join injuries from mouse usage that would be interesting.). I'm not sure that people have finger problems as often as they have wrist problems. Anyways, I never claimed that it were impossible that one could get RSI from a repetitive activity. What I did dispute was that the marginal difference in hardness of a goban would have any significant affect. In any case comparing RSI injuries at the computer to RSI injuries from playing Go is apples to oranges. I have a hard time believing that Go players get any kind of significant increase in neuropathy, phalangeal joint injury, or RSI. Again, If you have any sources of epidemiological evidence that say otherwise I'd be interested in the citation.

Sounds good! Definitely happy to go in that direction if the quality is there, and I haven't found anything bad about Kuroki so far.

As for finger injuries, I'm not really worried about that...I suspect my wife would give me other injuries to worry about long before it became an issue, were I to play Go that much

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I would suggest that you consider what you expect to use the board for. In addition to being a go book junkie (200+ unread volumes and counting), I am also a go board junkie. I have: a 6-inch katsura floor board (thick snow-grade stones), a 2-inch kaya table board (less thick snow-grade stones), a 1-inch bamboo table board (yunzi stones), a cheap folding board (glass stones), and 4 different traveling boards (2 kinds of magnetic, 1 vinyl, and 1 cloth). The problem is there is no such thing as the perfect go board. The floor board is the most fun for playing with friends - which I do not do very often at home! I find it hard on my back to use it when studying (less movement probably). This only gets worse with age - I am in my late 50's. It is easier to study on a table. Thick stones look nice but they are harder to handle. So when I use my floor board, I normally use the thinner stones that I bought with the kaya board. The handling problem also has gotten worse with age in my case - dryer skin and lately the start of arthritis. Good boards last a long time, so think ahead. Do you have a nice deck or yard that you might want to sit out in to study or play? You might not want to spend a lot on snow-grade stones. If I bought another set of shell stones, I would definitely choose a lower grade so I would mind it less when (not if) I lost/broke one occasionally.

Do you have kids? If so or if there is a likelihood for kids (or grandkids) to be crawling around any time in the foreseeable future, consider whether you really want a nice expensive block of wood plus bowls of expensive bite-sized stones sitting around on the floor. I bought my floor board 20-odd years ago just after my daughter was born. I considered that grubby mite crawling around in front of me for about 10 seconds before deciding that maybe katsura would be sufficient for my needs.

My fundamental philosophy after years of varied experience is that a good board is a great boost to you enjoyment of go. However: 1. you should always have practical usability in mind and 2. you should spend just enough so that if your best go friend has a little too much and spills a glass of beer (you are Australian, right?) on your board, he/she will still be your best go friend.

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

ez4u, are you also a go bowl junkie?
Do you happen to know if they still make Goseigen-style bowls in Japan (as opposed to Kitani-style ones)?

Sorry, the bowls are just these things that hold my stones. As a result, I have no idea what the different types are or what kind I have.

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

I admit to being a lover of go bowls (not a junkie, I can stop anytime I want to!). I have five sets of stones and bowls: 1) chestnut bowls with glass stones, 2) Keyaki bowls with 9.2 mm jitsuyo slate and shell, 3) Karin bowls with 8.8 mm yuki slate and shell, 4) Kuzu bowls with 9.8 mm tsuki slate and shell, and 5) mulberry bowls with 8.0 mm yuki slate and Japanese clam shell stones.

My mulberry bowls, which I use with my kaya 6 cm table-top board, are hirakata, or "flat" model. They are wider and somewhat shallower than the standard model. I have never seen reference to "Go Seigen" or "Kitani" model bowls in Japanese publications, only on the Samarkand website when it was in business. Samarkand sold mostly Korean goods so maybe those bowl styles are a Korean thing. In Japan "Honinbo" shape bowls are occasionally seen, a more cylindrical shape. Except for these shapes there are different sizes, such as medium, large, extra large and extra extra large, which are suitable for different thicknesses of stones.

"Go Seigen" and "Kitani" bowls are coined by Janice Kim for when Samarkand was still in the retail business of selling books and equipment.

quoted from http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive ... 00200.html

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

It seems, then, that the "Go Seigen style" bowls might be the same as the Japanese hirakata. These are still made in Japan. A quick check of the Nihon Ki-in online shop shows they are selling this style in chestnut and keyaki (zelkova) woods. Since these bowls are easily available in Japan you might try asking Kiseido in Japan whether they can supply them. I also see that Kuroki has a "custom request" option and I imagine that they could also supply this kind of bowl. Probably the hirakata style is available in many different kinds of wood.

gowan & tchan001, Thank you very much.

gowan, you don't seem to have 10.7mm (size 38) slate & shell -- have you tried it? It's fantastic.

Apologies for missing this post! I’ve been focusing on studying and tried to avoid the temptation to distract myself looking at boards etc…rather than playing

Hmm, well, I’ve since decided to pick up a nice table board first and then a floor board once I hit 1d (as determined by the local authority…may be stronger or weaker than other 1d ranks). I tend to play a bit against friends at home, but I also want to be able to play against friends on a nice board at a café/library etc…but not so nice that I’ll break down when I bump it against a wall.

I had a play with a variety of stones at the most recent tournament, and found that I like the feel of a medium thickness stone…I hate the wobble of a thick bi-convex stone.

I do…I suspect the cheaper table board might be handy for this

Excellent advice!

No kids yet…but my friends are getting to that age now where they’re bringing their children over. Hmm…also good advice to think about.

LOL! Yes, definitely good advice. It would probably be wine or a martini/Gin and Tonic in my household, but your point is an excellent one. I think, perhaps, a Katsura board and a modest set of stones/bowls should do me just fine based on your advice 

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