The harder part of Go

[Phoenix]

I like to 'share' a game with someone in person. Discuss positions and the flow, and comment on moves. The game is, after all, a negotiation about dividing up a cake. Online games leave me cold. They feel like a mathematical exercise against a computer, and all you get out of it is a final score. I know you can chat by text online, but the effort of typing compared with speaking, and the lag (the game has moved on before you can type and post a comment) mean that it is a poor substitute.

I have never played with physical stones, but I do not think computer graphics are an issue for me.

On KGS I sometimes play games with no-time after chatting with people in rooms and setting it up that way. It's been a great experience every time.

Also, get a set! I've found playing Go in person is much easier with one.

Seriously though, my experience of studying anything Go-related while placing stones on a board compared to clicking on an empty computer board has been great. I think it's very much the same with most players. There's just something about physically handling the stones and considering the position on a real board while thinking through that gives the process an extra boost, and an extra level of fun.

[jts]

I must say I am impressed by the concern and advice being offered to someone who might have given up on the game. The old stereotype about Go players being more helpful and friendly than chess players is mostly true, in my experience. Makes me more likely to pick up the game again.

I just thirty minutes ago was in a bookstore, perusing books with titles like Simply Slav, Attacking with the Sicilian, Nizmo-Everything, Changing up the Tyigorin, Stylish Openings and You.... (There was also a great book about a bridge murder that I wish I had bought for my grandmother!) At that point I was thinking rather loftily about how superior go is.

That has gone over my head . Was it the fact that there are openings with names that you picked up on, or the use of "simply", "attacking", "stylish"?

I wasn't clear. In Go, 90%+ of books are about tactics, life and death, problems, general strategic ideas, etc. There are a few joseki books and encyclopedia, but no books on a single joseki, and I can think of only two books that deal with a specific opening strategy.

For chess, meanwhile, out of two shelves of chess books, 90%+ will be not just about the opening, but about a specific opening, and indeed a specific branch of moves along a specific, already somewhat unusual, opening. (For example, the branch of the Sicilian where black wants to develop an active attack). Thus, to a go player, it appears that a huge amount of effort in the chess world goes into learning the opening book inside and out.

(This doesnt even start to get into all the tedium of chess "tactics", which can devolve into memorizing the specific spaces on the board which are good for a certain kind of fork.)

That has also gone over my head. Forks depend on the relative positions of pieces, not spaces of the board. The only squares that are slightly more interesting than the others are f2 and f7 in the opening.

Right, f7 and c7 for knight forks, d5 and e5 as outposts for setting up knight forks, e7 and f6 knight forks after 0-0, h5 for queen forks... I don't mean to pick on chess, which is quite fun after all, but in Go after you've learned one tactic the next level is to learn about a more complicated tactic, or to apply the same tactic in more difficult combinations, whereas in chess the next step is to remember specific spaces on the board where the tactic is likely to work. Which, again, makes it seem odd to me that you are sticking to chess because you hate memorization -- but hey, if you simply say "I have more fun with chess", what's to argue with? I'm just commenting because I feel like you must have misunderstood something about Go!

I can definitely relate to what Lyzl said on http://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=7505:

I think for me personally, it has a lot to do with the anonymity and seriousness of games online.

...

I like to 'share' a game with someone in person. Discuss positions and the flow, and comment on moves. The game is, after all, a negotiation about dividing up a cake. Online games leave me cold. They feel like a mathematical exercise against a computer, and all you get out of it is a final score. I know you can chat by text online, but the effort of typing compared with speaking, and the lag (the game has moved on before you can type and post a comment) mean that it is a poor substitute.

I have never played with physical stones, but I do not think computer graphics are an issue for me.

I definitely feel this. Truth be told, I haven't played on kgs for a while, partly due to life and partly due to having a wonderful local club where we goof off and harangue each other while we play. But when I was on KGS, the ASR league was a great way to meet people who want to take a more friendly approach to the game. The beginner room and the teaching ladder room also had this flavor, to some degree. But nearly always in online go, people prefer to focus on playing during the game, and to be chatty and friendly during the review or while spectating another player's game. If you get to know a people on KGS that way, you won't be anonymous for very long... it is a relatively small community.

[billywoods]

Just a ramble, but...

Too hard, too complicated, I'm too dumb for that.

My brother (early secondary school age) likes to play chess against me. He loses every time (worries about pieces too much, doesn't bother to mount an attack), and insists that he's far too stupid for the game. I wish there was a way I could convince him that:

• he is making huge progress,
• I win because I'm more careful than him, more thorough than him, and a little more practised than him, not because I'm more intelligent than him,
• in the real world, even average-level club players would wipe the floor with us both,
• given a couple of months of quite basic and fun study for half an hour a day, he could start beating me easily.

Of course, I tell him these things, but he doesn't believe me. He simply doesn't have the perspective that someone older with self-taught skills has. He has never dragged himself up from being a complete beginner to being reasonably good at anything. He's never felt humiliated at being an idiot and then sorted the problem out through his own volition - there have always been people (parents, teachers...) standing behind him pushing him forwards. He's grown to rely on authority figures to do the thinking for him. Perfectly natural at his age.

My brother is young, and may still grow out of it - but I wonder if there's an extent to which the people you mention suffer from the same thing, and simply never grew out of it? The go community is full of autodidacts who have a lot of faith in their own ability to perform mentally challenging tasks, most of whom have gone from being beginners to mid-DDK, SDK or dan level off their own bat - relying heavily on endless valuable games, guidance from stronger players and so on, but ultimately being driven by their own desire to get better, spurred on by their own success, and not disheartened too much by their own failure. Intelligence doesn't come into it.

Perhaps such people in the wider world are rare. I dare say I know a lot of them.

[hyperpape]

Hmm, I think go may have been the first thing I tried hard at. I'd pretty much done things I was smart enough to do, slacked off at those, and given up on everything else. As for Go, I didn't try hard at it either.

I think I learned how to work at things that were tough sometime after age 25.

Edit: so I looked at this again, and it's blatantly self-contradictory. What I'd say is that go is the first hobby I cultivated and persisted at, putting forth some effort, but I still didn't really work hard at it. I just kept playing.

Even that might be wrong: I'd been reading political theory and philosophy on my own for several years when I picked up go. So if you count that as a hobby, go wasn't first.

But I still didn't work hard at things until later, after I'd played go for several years.

[jlaire]

I don't mean to pick on chess, which is quite fun after all, but in Go after you've learned one tactic the next level is to learn about a more complicated tactic, or to apply the same tactic in more difficult combinations, whereas in chess the next step is to remember specific spaces on the board where the tactic is likely to work.

It's always entertaining to read what Go players think about chess.

[jts]

I don't mean to pick on chess, which is quite fun after all, but in Go after you've learned one tactic the next level is to learn about a more complicated tactic, or to apply the same tactic in more difficult combinations, whereas in chess the next step is to remember specific spaces on the board where the tactic is likely to work.

It's always entertaining to read what Go players think about chess.

I've seen this in several books for teaching chess tactics to beginners. (Looking for presents for my brother.) I'm happy to believe that B&N, the lamented Borders, several university bookstores and local game stores all have equally bad taste when it comes to chess. Can you recommend a tactics book that doesn't take this approach? I've had my eyes peeled.

[PeterPeter]

I don't mean to pick on chess, which is quite fun after all, but in Go after you've learned one tactic the next level is to learn about a more complicated tactic, or to apply the same tactic in more difficult combinations, whereas in chess the next step is to remember specific spaces on the board where the tactic is likely to work.

That is not my experience at all. In chess, once you have learnt the tactics, the next step is to string them together in longer and longer series of moves. If you can pick out a series of 8+ forcing moves from nowhere, that ends up with a decisive advantage, you are on your way to mastering the game.

[PeterPeter]

Can you recommend a tactics book that doesn't take this approach? I've had my eyes peeled.

"Winning Chess Tactics" by Yasser Seirawan is a good overview.

[billywoods]

I don't mean to pick on chess, which is quite fun after all, but in Go after you've learned one tactic the next level is to learn about a more complicated tactic, or to apply the same tactic in more difficult combinations, whereas in chess the next step is to remember specific spaces on the board where the tactic is likely to work.

It's always entertaining to read what Go players think about chess.

I'd love to read what someone who played chess and go to a decent standard thought about the two games. I'm sure that must have been written, but I'm not quite sure how to find it...

[John Fairbairn]

I wasn't clear. In Go, 90%+ of books are about tactics, life and death, problems, general strategic ideas, etc. There are a few joseki books and encyclopedia, but no books on a single joseki

This made me smile because of a blast from the past. Just two days ago, at the London Open, some stranger mentioned that he had a copy of my long-forgotten translation of Fujisawa's book on the Avalanche (for which you need the original, before you ask). But apart from this there have been (large) books on e.g. the Magic Sword and Taisha, and you can also find books on other single josekis even if the titles are not so sexy. Admittedly not in English, but....

[Polama]

Here's a few tricks I've picked up for making things a little more pleasant for beginners:

Emote over a couple good moves. Furrow your brow, stroke your beard (if you've got one), say 'hmm...' Nothing excessive, but it gives beginners a sense that competency isn't so far off, and it can speed up learning by demonstrating which lines of thinking lead to a good move.

If a player is carefully reading things out, play slowly so they don't feel rushed. If they're dithering, play quickly to encourage them to speed up. When your opponent is coming towards an important series of moves: a fight or chase or life&death, slow your play down. It's easy to read out a fight then play it quickly following what you read, but there's a tendency to adopt the tempo of your opponent, so you want to try to slow the beginner down when they need to use more time to think. Something obvious, like you can't cut a bamboo joint, can be hard reading at the start.

I try to record an .sgf every couple months of a game with my wife (we learned the game together). At one point she was feeling discouraged and we watched one of the first games I'd recorded. Seeing how bad some of our moves were before made her realize how much she'd already improved. If you can figure out a way to incorporate recording a game a few weeks in, you could 'keep it in your back pocket' for when they hit that wall of self-doubt.

Try to hold instructive comments to the end (people seem to take it much less personally after a game), try to focus on just a few general things, and oversimplify. To deeply understand why a move was good can require looking at dozens of variations. Just show a couple moves of one of those variations. It gives the beginner something digestible, and by explaining reasoning with simple ideas they can see that they're smart enough to be stronger.

Snacks, caffeine and friendly chatter between games can all make a new player remember the club in a positive light. Sometimes you can pull somebody through those first 50 losses not because they see that Go is a beautiful game yet, but because they like to go to the club meetings.

[Phoenix]

Emote over a couple good moves. Furrow your brow, stroke your beard (if you've got one), say 'hmm...' Nothing excessive, but it gives beginners a sense that competency isn't so far off, and it can speed up learning by demonstrating which lines of thinking lead to a good move.

If a player is carefully reading things out, play slowly so they don't feel rushed. If they're dithering, play quickly to encourage them to speed up.

Pavlov style.

Seriously though, this is some great advice, the idea of lightly pushing the pupil on the right track in a non-invasive way. I agree with all of this.

This thread had been derailed so far, I was ready to treat it as kikashi and move on. Thank you.

[Phoenix]

I debated whether to do this, but I have to brag about my new trainee.

I introduced a friend's boyfriend to Go today. He loves games of all kind and is a true strategist. We love a lot of the same things (apparently), so I thought I'd give it a shot.

As we discussed here, I tried to go slow, teach the concepts one at a time, etc. I thought to show him liberties and capturing, then play Capture Go. Problem was, when I introduced liberties, put stones down (center, side, corner), made him count the libs. Next I showed how an opponent's stone touching takes away a liberty. We haven't gotten to connecting stones yet and I surrounded the stone in the center on three sides when he stopped me and said "So if I wanted to escape, I would play here...", added a stone to run out, and continued with "...because this adds two more liberties, right?".

This man has truly never played Go!

Capture Go was not going to cut it for him, so we played a few games on 9x9 (I used Japanese rules - my favorite) where I introduced some additional concepts. After a less-than two hour session he now understands life & death, territory, ko, seki, ladders, nets... The works! I felt like I was guided to him simply to unlock his latent Go potential.

Of course I can't let him catch up - ever. I also have a friend I used to destroy who is now shodan, and my dad is apparently learning the basics online (after more than a decade!). There's the extra motivation I needed to go up the dan levels! To top things off, this new student of mine is now fully in love with Go (after the first day!), and has agreed to help me start my club!

It's been a truly fantastic experience. Things are definitely looking up!

[EdLee]

Of course I can't let him catch up - ever.

Congrats. Let us know if one day he starts crushing you on the board.
Maybe later he'll enjoy a Malkovich game with you here, too?

[xed_over]

As we discussed here, I tried to go slow, teach the concepts one at a time, etc. I thought to show him liberties and capturing, then play Capture Go.
...
Capture Go was not going to cut it for him,

Yeah, some people just "get it" right away. You have to be flexible and adapt to your student's natural strengths.

I debated whether to do this, but I have to brag about my new trainee.

congrats!