I don't know where the lose 100 games saying came from, but let me guess. In the West a lot of players learned to play without receiving a proper handicap, so they lost an awful lot of their first games, but they persevered and got past that obstacle. Then they advised new players to follow in their footsteps and not worry about losing at first.

50판은 져야 바둑 배운다

I think that proverb arose when new players were likely playing face to face, high handicap games against strong players. In that context, expecting to lose a lot while learning the game makes sense.

I, too, am not aware of the origin of this phrase. However, a similar phrase can be seen if you peruse the interwebz for Go Proverbs written in Korean (though, who knows? Maybe they just translated the phrase from English).



Admittedly, here, it's about losing 50 games instead of 100. If you win your next 50, I suppose you're succeeding about half of the time

That being said, I agree with Bill that handicap games should be encouraged. Though, when I was a beginner, I wouldn't be surprised if I were to lose my first 50 or 100 handicap games, too :-S

When I was a beginner and joined my small local club the next weakest person was 7k EGF and most of my games were against 5 kyus and 2kyus. It took a good while before my handicaps offline felt proper. I didn't mind, it was usually more interesting to lose to a 2k in the club than to win against another 18k on KGS.

I wonder if that Korean proverb has anything to do with Nam Chihyung. She is generous about rendering go material in English into Korean.

A lot of players do not like to give more than 9 stones handicap. They might try the beer handicap system. Instead of giving stones above 9, White downs a beer for every handicap stone that he does not give.

I don't find this advice to be very helpful to a confused beginner. Someone could lose x amount of games and still have learned nothing about why they were losing.

I don't know about that. While I agree that the "lose 100 games" advice might not be very helpful as is, my experience is that the first dozen(s) of 9*9 games with beginners are there to teach them to see ataris, not forget that the first line is part of the board, etc. For that "knowledge" to become ingrained in you brain, you don't need comments from a stronger player (not that it would hurt!), but repetition through many games is necessary.
That's how I understand this proverb, not "lose" in the sense of "be prepared to lose, you weakling!", but more like "your brain is not yet wired to see the very basic building blocks of go, you'll have play a lot to acquire that".

Instead of giving stones above 9, White downs a beer for every handicap stone that he does not give.

I've always understood it as: (taking handicap as complete beginner from sdk or stronger) lose a bunch of gamed, realise a serious mistake you were making, lose a bunch of games while putting up a better fight, realise another major error, repeat until you win enough to reduce handicap by one, start again. Going from 8 to 7 happens much faster than going 9 to 8 too in my experience but having someone stay long enough until that happens can be tricky if they can't get close to even games too. The average beginner on here doesn't want to play online which can mean taking a lot of high handicaps at the club due to lack of players.