A business associate who I knew showed it to me. At first glance, it seemed trivial: stone surround stones, not much different than Xs blocking Os in tic tac toe, just on a larger scale.

But he was a an exceptionally inteligent person, and he assurred me that it had him continually stymied and perplexed. So I tried a game.

I'm still looking for the bottom of that rabbit hole.

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Help make L19 more organized. Make an index: https://lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=5207

@Marcus- of course I read the whole thing,it's a fatal flaw I have ;D

@Joaz Banbeck- In the end, I guess we're all Alice in Confusing as Heck Land eh?!

Arguably, you only see motion in one direction because anyone who might be interested in go has already been exposed to chess due to its ubiquity.

I ran out of excuses.

I was a chess player, and rather focused on cracking master. One of the guys from the blitz crowd tried to get me to come play for months.

I wasn't really interested, It would mean abandoning all the progress that I had made. Finally, I agreed to just swing by and check it out just to get him off my back. It's hard to remember the exact motivations that day.

What I can remember, were the consequences....

So began, the Massacre of the Shaolin Temple....


All night I played, high handicaps, low handicaps, beer handicaps. (And we had a diverse crowd, I felt I ought to snag even one game)

Finally, near the end of a game, (in the midst of clear violations of the Geneva convention) One small province, held out against the hordes. Nothing large, but it was forced, and it was tactical, and I had made two eyes despite my opponent's efforts to kill it.

That interested me, because it meant that my chess reading was still useful; that I wouldn't be wasting all that study.

So it got me to come back. I still was more interested in chess, but then when I started to see progress, I became addicted to it.

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

As for when I started playing...

I think I first saw go in this book of 20 games or so with glass beads as markers we got when I was young. We didn't understand it, and didn't play it.

When I was in college, a friend I spoke to online convinced me to play, and I played on KGS for a month or two at most. A few years later, he convinced me again, and I played for another month or so, but not much in between or after.

Following that, I read about the game a bit on senseis library, but didn't really play at all until maybe 2011 or so, when I ran into people at work who played. The strongest player was about 10k, and I lost to him, but not by too much. After a couple games, I could beat him with 2 stones, a few later, we were about even, and I started going to a local go club and playing regularly at that point.

I had played chess previously, but got frustrated with the way a mistake often cost the game, and part of what drew me to go initially was the fact that that wasn't always the case. I have attention problems, as well, and felt that go's open-endedness better suited my spontaneous creativity than chess. Of course, I was never much of a chess player and don't think I ever broke 1000 or 1100 ELO.

I started to play Go because I enjoy games: chess, backgammon, san juan, dvonn and so on. Back then I was an avid chessplayer... until I found Go. I was hooked immediately. But like I said, it was easy for me to accept Go because I like different games.

Maybe you can get your friend into Go by telling him/her the wonderful history of the game. All the famous matches. Find in youtube a nice match with exciting commentary, if he/she likes deep intellectual games they will find it interesting.

If your friend like to read: the master of go by kawabata.

Good luck.

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si no puedes triunfar, muere gloriosamente

This was what introduced it to me. Or vice versa.

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Confucius in the Analects says "even playing go is better than eating chips in front of tv all day." -- kivi

I found go through my broader love of board games. I'd always liked games, but when I moved to Colorado in 2008 I found a few people who shared my interest and it quickly became one of my primary hobbies. I started spending a lot of time on boardgamegeek.com, where go is pretty highly regarded (though nowhere near the most frequently played.) I didn't know anyone who played, though, so I didn't pick up go until I found a small folding set in a local thrift store. My wife and I taught ourselves the game, and it wasn't long before go became my favorite game. We actually got a nice board for our fifth anniversary in hopes that it would be a game we could spend a lifetime playing together. (That didn't end up working out--I love studying so quickly outpaced my wife--but we still occasionally play a 9x9 game together.)

I continue playing because it is fun, great mental exercise, has a variety of ways to engage the game (playing, books, problems, etc.), and is something I can easily work on in the evening after my daughter has gone to bed. Plus it is simply the most beautiful and challenging game I have ever played.

I first read about Go in an article in Games magazine back in the 1980s, but didn't have a set and wouldn't have had anybody to play against. When I was in college in the early 90s there was some Go program on one of the FTP servers, so I tried a game or two but obviously had no idea what I was doing. It was only when I heard a report on Radio Japan around 1999 about Michael Redmond being promoted to 9p that I finally decided to take up the game. Not that I had any pretensions of getting to 9p, but since I had internet access I was able to learn more about the game and find the various servers. I've been playing poorly ever since.

I happened to stumble onto Sensei's Library while looking for something completely unrelated.

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Poka King of the south east.

@TheBigH- ah, yes. That often happen to me as well, especially at midnight whilst I tried to procrastinate on an impending deadline. Did you know that penguins have knees?

As far as I am aware, all descendants of dinosaurs have knees.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

@DrStraw- what I said was meant as a joke for procrastinating, drunk, and dead tired college students.

I call BS. I watched March of the Penguins and not once did they mention knees.

When you watched the March of the HS Band how many times did you talk about knees?

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

As far as I am aware, the distinction between modern birds and dinosaurs is arbitrary and perhaps nonexistent. As literal dinosaurs then, penguins certainly have knees.

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Confucius in the Analects says "even playing go is better than eating chips in front of tv all day." -- kivi

I vaguely remember that there was an article in the leading Finnish newspaper 'Helsingin Sanomat' about the (then only Finnish) go club 'Helsingin Go-kerho'. I was immediately interested (I played chess and bridge, and liked all intellectual games), and went to club's weekly meeting.

I still remember that my first game was against Vesa Laatikainen ('Vesa' here) and I was astonished by his ability to replay the game entirely from memory (although I knew that my - now late - father, who used to be a member of the Finnish national bridge team could replay 32 or so bridge hands played during an evening entirely from memory).

This was around 1985.

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Offending ad removed

Replace wikipedia with Senseis Library.

I first heard about go (weiqi) when I was read Chung Kuo: The Middle Kingdom by David Wingrove. This series of speculative fiction had a brilliant and diabolical character who was also a go master. The references to the game in the book fascinated me and I searched the internet for more info. It was several years before I actually played the game.