The name is Pelly and I'm extremely new to the whole Go world. I'm trying to better myself by taking up an intellectual, stimulating activity for the mind.

Everybody I know plays chess, and puts it on a pedastal like if your great at chess...your great and smart at life. No matter what walks of life who play chess....I got friends and family who are geeks to criminal gangsters...I even have a Carlton Banks from a Fresh Prince of Bel Air type cousin and he's so snobby and pompous about Chess that it makes me sick.

I was going down the Chess route until one day I was watching the "Art of War" documentary from History Channel and they were talking about Chess compared to Go in militray context and after that I was hooked and I been researching, playing, reading, and even watch an anime based on the game of GO.

So here I am. I won't be messaging as much until I'm comfortable with my Go skills, until then I will be reading your messages. I've already spent an hour browsing through the topics and loving it.

Welcome!

Don't be afraid to post.

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Welcome to Go! A lot of us here have played chess. I learned from my father (who had a lot of high school chess trophies), but I find the game to be tedious to study. Like me, Go favors intuition over calculation or memorization (though all of these aspects can be useful). Hopefully you'll find Go to be more interesting than Chess.

Good luck!

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Howdy, and welcome! Don't worry about not posting. We understand being new, we've all been there. Ask questions about anything you want, and someone will almost always be willing to help explain. And for some interesting reading material, check out Joaz's index for useful posts for beginners here: viewtopic.php?p=10545#p10545 . And if you find anything particularly helpful with helping you learn a given topic, feel free to post there so he can tag it, and index it for other beginners to find.

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Someday I want to be strong enough to earn KGS[-].

Welcome! I (re)discovered Go through Yahoo! chess.

Have you found Sensei's Library yet?

http://senseis.xmp.net/

I saw that History Channel show, too. It had neat computer animations of Westmoreland sinking into a chess board like quicksand, while General Giap marched his troops along the lines of a Go board. Very cool, I thought. It also talked about Sun Tzu being as successful as he was as a result of his being a Go player, and adopting what he'd learned from the game into his military strategy.

Something that you might want to mention to your chess-snob friends is that, while professional chess players have switched over to become professional Go players, I've never heard of it happening the other way around. Or just drop in there that, while Go is orders of magnitude more complex than chess, it does not require such a baroque ruleset, relying instead upon the beauty of mathematical simplicity. Or something like that. You said you've been reading a lot, so you've probably come across better quotes than I could come up with.

Nice to meet you, BTW! Glad you've discovered such a great game!

I've met more Go snobs than Chess snobs. I don't know any Chess players that don't appreciate Go.

To be fair to Chess comparing the "magnitude of complexity" of the 2 games doesn't have much meaning. Chess is more than complex enough to consume the life of a human being. Chess is a fine game and blitz Chess is a lot of fun.

I have met many more chess players who even don't know what go is. In fact, most here in the Western Hemisphere don't know what go is.

That's not my experience at all. Go isn't really a secret anymore.

In Hawaii it may be different as there is a significant minority of people from Japan and China. Here in Germany most people don't know go. From several hundred of my colleagues at work only two know about go. From my family and friends only the crossword puzzle fans know, that an "Asian Board Game with two letters" is go, but that's all they know about the game.

All the ethnically Chinese, Japanese, and Korean people I've talked to about Go know about it, whether they can play it or not. Outside of that demographic, very few people (far < 1% I would easily guess) seem to know about Go in Ontario.

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We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

I have, that's why I know that they didn't know about it before. Every now and then I do tsumego in my office during lunch time. Some of the people who see me doing this are curious enough to ask what I am doing, and when I explain them, I always hear ahs and ohs and they say that they've never heard about it.

yes i have, i use it to get good reccomendations for go books. And nobody I know has ever heard of go except a few asian friends and they only know about it, never played.

but i think that's why I like it, playing something different is cool.

Not quite a professional, but at my former Chess club there was an IM who used to be a strong Go player.

Before I learned that he played Go (post-mortem), I always wondered why he had a habit of saying "Chess is a simple game".

It is probably true that we Go players tend to be more snobbish, whereas in case of Chess players it is mostly ignorance about "the other game". I do think it's fair to say though that Chess is to Go what Checkers is to Chess.

Are we sure that people aren't misusing "snob" here? I always took a snob to be someone who thought that certain people were superior and inferior, with the particular connotation of inferior social status. Making value judgments about things (or perhaps even between people, but not with respect to status) isn't snobbery. So thinking that Go is wonderful and Chess is fairly dull, a fairly common attitude among Go players, isn't snobbery.

So e.g. a wine lover has very strong opinions about which wines taste better than others; a wine snob has very strong opinions about people who prefer certain wines.

It is intellectual snobbery. Chess players may assume themselves to be superior to people who do not play chess regularly as a result of having confused their fondness for chess with the intellectual acuity culturally presupposed to be necessary to play the game well. Go players can likewise mistakenly assume themselves to be superior to chess players by looking at the relative complexities of the two games and arriving at incorrect conclusions regarding the sort of people who would be enthusiastic about them. IMHO.

This is a bit off topic, but I get a little tired of all the chess bashing.

It is interesting to me that in almost 30 years of playing tournament chess, I have never heard a chessplayer put down Go or Go players. In fact, many chessplayers I have known are interested in a wide variety of games. Many years ago, I played my first games of Risk, Diplomacy, and Othello with chessplayers during chess tournaments.

I have very rarely heard serious chessplayers say that chess skill is a sign of intelligence; I hear this far more often from people who don't play chess, or who don't play it seriously.

Is it really necessary to put down chess to enjoy Go? Is someone a better person for playing Go rather than chess? My strong suspicion is that the answer to both of these questions is "no."

If you like Go better than chess, then play it. But don't be deceived into thinking that your choice of Go over chess is anything more than a personal preference, or has anything to do with the intrinsic merit of the two games, because it isn't and it doesn't.