Wow. I finally got around to reading one of his posts. I got about to the point where he accused the AGA of being run by "trust fund babies".

Advertising is a spurt solution. It plays on people short-term emotions - but emotions are often insufficient for long term effort. Sure - you can get people fired up by clever advertising so they pick up Go - but this will fizzle in the long run. Unless you want to keep putting effort in firing them up continuously so they stick to it. But I am not sure how feasible that is financially.

In a sense - HnG was a perfect example of Go advertising - it did some good, but in the long run - it just fizzled out and did not leave up to the promise of thousands of new players beating their mighty chests and proclaiming the will to become pros within a year.

In short - advertisement can convince people to try something new... maybe. But if this is not really something they wanted to begin with - it will never last. And, lets face it - in the US playing brainiac board games is a pastime of a small percentage of the nerdy fringe.

IPod is a wrong analogy. It was there to fill a very real niche to provide portable music - started by boomboxes and going through walkmans. People WANTED portable music, wanted it very badly. iPod was a better solution to an existing problem. This cannot be said of Go - there is no problem of people wanting to play a brainiac board game but not finding a good one.

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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

I disagree... I spent a decent amount of time searching for a board game that would meet certain requirements before realizing the game had existed for millennia ...

But I'm sure that out of the tons of HNG fans, there were plenty of people who stuck around and kept playing, and taught the game to others, even if it was a small percentage of the originally exposed population. So it isn't entirely a fizzle. After all, nobody expects that everyone who tries Go will play it all their life, any more than all people would play chess just because they once learned how.

Re Robert Terry: Sorry about that, admin!.

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Is anyone else amused by how there've been 125 posts here about a blog that, as far as I can tell, has had zero non-spam comments posted to it?

However much you hate it, but I feel Robert Terry has a valid point to make about exactly this. (If you manage to ignore the trust fund baby insult for a moment.)



Go isn't necessarily a brainiac board game, but this is the image of Go created and perpetuated by people, who themselves were attracted by this brainiac image of (the game computers can't beat / the game we have seen in films like Pi and A Beautiful Mind / ancient eastern wisdom / it is so complicated that we don't even bother to explain / the game only the guys from the computer department are playing). To make a bad analogy: who would like to draw things if it had an image of "complicated subconscious processing of visual data" and who in his right mind would advertise drawing like this, yet you see this done to Go all the time.

Last year, a turkish player (Eren Kurter from Ankara) made an appearance in a women lifestyle tv show advertising Go, explaining Go, the Turkish Go scene, their programs for children etc. This kind of advertisement was so un-brainiac, so very different from everything I have seen in English, in short truly praiseworthy. And in my humble opinion that is a better approach to make Go popular than hoping for a Bobby Fisher to turn up or other initiatives that start at the wrong end of the spectrum.

Could you elaborate a little on this? What aspects did Eren Kurter focus on in his presentation that were not related to the game's intellectual value? I'm curious about the differences to the approaches that have been tried in the English/international media.

Is anything known about the effects of the presentation?

It makes sense to me. I definitely get the feeling that the AGA is organized by beginners and for the lifelong beginner, who has been 7kyu for twenty years, and is motivated to recruit new beginners to get their satisfaction from beating someone, anyone. For what its worth though, there is definitely no go schools or teaching organizations where young children are trained from young ages so, it can't really be all that bad.

By beginners? Well this is a really silly comment to begin with, but I can't turn down the opportunity for easy fun...Let's look at the board.

Paul Celmer 1 dan
Chuck Robbins 3 dan
Daniel Smith 2 dan
Lisa Scott can't find her in ratings--she was stronger than me the last time we were both at a tournament
Andrew Okun 1 dan
Gordon Castanza 9 kyu
Jie Li 9 dan

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Occupy Babel!

Lisa is 1k (was 1d before running a congress)... Chuck was 5d at one point.

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

What else is it, then? Ever tried solving a tsumego?

Have you ever watched what kind of people do crosswords? Or solve sudoku? All those people could do tsumego just as well.

Hm, I'm not so sure. My family has a number of crossword nuts, and a bunch of them fell for sudoku and kenken too. I thought they would be naturals for tsumego, but no. I think there May be some facet of intelligence linked to dyslexia (paralexia?) that they have that doesn't transfer to other puzzles.

I think it's more than they're candidates for tsumego, not guaranteed.

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Occupy Babel!

Sudoku and crosswords are highly brainiac activities, too!

The issue with go is the competitive aspect. Nobody cares how much you suck at sudoku. I don't know if sudoku competitions exist, but imagine how dorky that would be!

It's easy to solve sudoku "just for fun". It's much harder to play go "just for fun", because losing is not very fun and so everyone experiences a drive to improve, which involves work.

On the other hand, tsumego as an alternative to crosswords and sudoku actually sounds like a great idea! Maybe with right marketing (step 1 - remove all references to go) it could actually work. But sudoku and crosswords come with instructions that fit in one short paragraph. This was probably crucial to their success. Nobody has yet succeeded in describing the rules of go in a way that's both laconic and approachable...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudoku#Competitions
Other than pros (and pro gamblers? ), most of us amateurs are by definition doing exactly that.

My grandmother does Sudoku. On the one hand, my grandmother is a very smart woman (I mean, she's part of my family tree, duh... ), but on the other, she is not your stereotype of a go player even once you ignore her age. I guess she does genealogical research, which makes her just a bit nerdy, but I suspect there are many more 80 year olds doing genealogy than go.

In any case, even if Sudoku or Crosswords are for brainiacs, it would be great if Go were as popular as either here in the US.

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Occupy Babel!

Apparently unnoticed by all of us, Mr. Terry, without mentioning L19 by name, has responded to criticism with this post.

On a side note, Mr. Terry, among other things, does work as a translator and has made a considerable amount of Japanese material available to western audiences. He writes:

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Patience, grasshopper.

Wow... reading his latest post, I almost feel like suggesting to him that the Western go community is indeed beyond all hope, and he may do better by focusing his efforts on this new game called Redstone...

No wonder he has so many issues with the AGA.