I thought of this thread after I finished this game. I lost a large group (not just mostly lost, but "destroyed all the aji thrashing about hoping to live" lost), but I not only won, I think I won rather convincingly. So to the pro-resignation faction: was my behavior unacceptable and irritating? Did I turn this game into a turgid Russian novel? Or am I misjudging the position at move 121?

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i am usually in the resignation camp, but your game looks ok. your group died and it was really big, but you have strong influence over the rest of the board. w K18 is not even kill, more like a harvest, and when black fails to live with P16 - and living is pretty difficult for him, in such a closed space - you are probably already ahead. some of your moves in the upper side area were severe and perhaps there could be a refutation to some of them, but i see nothing inappropriate

in my opinion, one should resign when he is behind and sees no reasonable chance to turn the game around
(heh, but what chance is reasonable enough and which is not?)

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Spilling gasoline feels good.

I might be wrong, but probably not.

I think your play was very sound, and I think you played a very good rest of the game. It's a big important board, he has weak groups, you have some pretty serious influence. He's managed a great result by killing your group, but I wouldn't consider the game over at all.

It's up to him, if he thinks he's a long way ahead, to consolidate everything, count, and then make sure he stays ahead. If there's a lot still up in the air in the game, it's not a won game.

hmmm ... with my 2/3/4k brain (I have no clue what rank I should claim at this point; some days are better than others) I still have no idea what the score of a game is unless there's a HUGE difference in score (read 50+ points, and even then, it's iffy). I'm going to assume that there are some games where I am likely going to play for much longer than my opponent feels is polite, and finish a number of games where I don't even realize I'm behind by 50 points.

My guess is I need to work on my counting ... it still sucks.

I hate that go reveals all my own shortcomings to me in a very blunt and straightforward manner. But then, this is also why I love it

1. 361 legal moves at the opening and only two are worth playing. An exaggeration, to be sure, but it is a little disappointing that for such an open-ended game your first move is almost invariable a 4-4 or 3-4 stone.

2. The name. Couldn't we have inherited Go by way of the Chinese or Koreans so it wouldn't be a homonym with one of the hundred most common words in English? Heck, even calling it Igo would be an improvement.

3. The difficulty of cultivating new players. The learning curve is incredibly steep on Go and it's pretty difficult to reliably incorporate new players. I've tried with various friends over the past five years and have rarely succeeded at inspiring more than lukewarm appreciation for the game. It takes a while to get from seeing a random arrangement of stones to understanding what the stones mean, and it's hard to get people to persist through that. Thus, I get precious little face-to-face play, which I consider the most leisurely and pleasurable way to play.

4. Handicap Go. I don't like taking handicaps and I don't like giving handicaps. I find the purest enjoyment of the game in the open board and the chance to build up a unique position of my own.

A few years ago, I went to the wonderful Japanese food mart near my house with a flyer for the Go club. We had complete and utter confusion until the woman behind the counter finally said "ahh! Igo!"

She thought I wanted to put up a flyer for a golf club. I resolved to always say "Igo" to Japanese folks. Or if I was really smart, I would have had the paper out in front of me.

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Occupy Babel!

This comment should have gotten more fanfare. Congrats, you made me laugh (loudly) at work.

Things I hate about Go:

1. The time commitments. The overall time commitment is huge. The time commitment just to play on KGS is also big (a dedicated hour is required to play a game).
   
2. The "fear" of playing... this fear is mostly because of #1 (will I have time to complete the game) and partly because I often don't feel mentally prepared to play when I have time to play (evenings before bed is not my most awake time of day).
   
3. Again back to #1, but the fact that certain priorities end up replacing the game (in my life) rather than reducing the amount of time I have to spend on it. I just finished my thesis (yay) and haven't really played (let alone studied) Go for ~3 years.
   
4. (Edit to add) Counting!!! This is a skill I need to REALLY work on to even get passable at it.

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Agreed. Hey, look what I listed as my rank here. The only time I even think about it is in regards to how many handicap stones might be needed to compete on an equal level with another player.



I don't know about this one. Having spent my freshman year of high school in Japan, and I say this without a hint of prejudice or bias, I speak Japanese only with the greatest displeasure. I have immense respect for the Japanese and their culture, and I do appreciate the beauty of their literature, poetry, and music, but I genuinely dislike speaking the language. That said, I found that this posed no stumbling block in learning to play Go. The few Japanese terms that the game uses are just that -- few, and not difficult to learn or remember. Roulette has far more French terms in it than Go does Japanese terms, yet some of the dullest, least multicultural unitedstatesians that I have met, I've met at the Roulette table.

I definitely don't feel like one has to learn a new language in order to learn to play Go. One only need learn a small handful of terms, as one would expect to do upon learning any new game, and all are shorter and not more foreign than standard Roulette terms such as "Voisins du Zéro", "Le tiers du cylindre", or "Rien ne va plus".

At any rate, you probably don't want to see what that bootprint would look like were it allowed to be made. Consider how US casinos have transformed the elegant strategy game Chemin de Fer into EZ MiniBac, a simplified version of Nevada baccarat that plays itself with no input from the "player" other than to place bets. "Players" cannot even touch the cards. I'm not saying that Go With American Characteristics would be a game that would be played without player input; I'm simply pointing out that if a poker-like strategy game can be turned into EZ MiniBac, you don't wanna see what could happen to Go.

(Actually, now that I think about it, this is all moot because it's been done. Go With American Characteristics is called Othello, or Reversi outside of the US, and has had everything interesting about Go removed from it.)



This I'll agree with entirely. It seems like if somebody knows nothing else about the game, the one thing that they do "know" is that is supposedly incredibly difficult and time-consuming to even learn the game's basic concepts, much less actually be able to play it (let alone even think about doing so competently). There's a definite intimidation factor that probably grows out of misreading well-intended but gushy comments from Go enthusiasts about how many orders of magnitude more complex than chess the game is.

The main issues I have with Go that are unique to the game itself (rather than being applicable to intellectual games of skill in general) are:

1) The game "cools down" at the endgame, and (almost by definition) all life-and-death issues have already been resolved and it's just a question of maximizing points. In chess, in contrast, often the game remains very "hot" in the endgame.

2) Most Western players are introduced to the game using Japanese rules, which are completely perplexing until you already understand the game. Then if I try to fix their confusion by introducing Chinese rules, they get thrown for a loop by the existence of multiple rulesets.

3) Multiple rulesets.

4) The fact that most of the literature and culture is non-Western can be cool in an "I'm learning about something obscure!" way, but it sometimes leaves me feeling like I am perpetually on the outside looking in.

For a complete beginner, having no damn clue what to do. As was noted in the Putting the Pieced Together thread, it just seems like it doesn't matter what you know. It doesn't matter that you know the basic rules, that you understand things like influence and so on at some level, that you are a relatively successful multi-game dilettante. Nothing matters. A couple stones plop down, and you're hopelessly confused. Whatever first instinct you might have to some play your opponent makes is more than likely completely wrong (or at least a blatant overplay, if the basic idea is correct).

In Starcraft or Magic you can say (even if you're a relative beginner) things like: "I'm going to build two barracks and then fast expand (game clock tells me it should happen around X:XX" or "I want a bunch of burn and little men and beat the snot out of their faces". These basic gameplans may have a ton of deficiencies, but they are there. It's much harder to make these kinds of simple statements of intent in Go, not to mention just general things like life and death, where a nice, big area just screams "invade me!" due to some structural deficiency.

I recently tried learning Yomi. I don't know how many games I've played, not terribly many, but it was amazing how a couple simple explanations very early on (mostly about the nature of the early, middle and endgame and the reasons that drive transition from one to the other) made things click. After that, I just... was there, and could just learn, learn, learn. The difficulty came from understanding the opponent, not so much the game.

Which is all fine. But I hate, hate, hatehatehate playing badly.

Also, Komi.

I have forgotten the year or so of flailing before I really started to play Magic, though. That a card should actually do something is a hard, hard lesson that takes a long, long time to actually learn. In my defense, I was confused and wanted to "play my way" instead of "just f*cking killing him". That mismotivation has since been corrected.

Feline disapproval. She claims she is the only one here with a permit to rattle and bat around small objects. She insists on napping on the go board when I am trying to play,