I first learned to play Go back in university, but never got very good (it was competing with learning how to program). Many years later, shortly after the war in Ukraine started, I was looking for an activity to share with my 8-year-old son. Life was chaotic then: everyone was anxious, we were hosting a refugee lady, and I could see the stress taking a toll on him. I wanted something where it would be clear we shouldn’t be disturbed – and Go fit perfectly. We started playing, and it was fun. One of the great things about Go is its elegant handicap system, which makes it possible for players at very different levels to still enjoy a fair, challenging game.
Since then, we’ve been going to the local Go club in Warsaw, and it’s become our main hobby. We play each other almost daily, travel to tournaments (sometimes abroad), and even spend our vacations at Go summer camp.
The camp is actually a magical event. It takes place at a campsite in the middle of the Kaszuby Lake District. The conditions are spartan – you either live in a tent or a five-person cabin, and hot water is scarce. But the crowd that gathers there is incredible. Over breakfast you might get an impromptu intro to lambda calculus, in the evening you might end up in a deep philosophical conversation, or hear travel stories from far-off places, or suddenly learn way more about knitting than you thought possible. When we first went, it felt like discovering our long-lost family.
The Go community is much smaller than chess, but also far more tight-knit and welcoming. I’ve heard chess can be more cutthroat, while in Go there’s this unspoken understanding that if you drive people away, you’ll have no one left to play with.
When I travel, I like to drop in on local Go clubs. It’s always been a great experience – I especially enjoyed visiting the San Francisco Go Club in Japantown.
I play almost exclusively over the board. I prefer long, thoughtful games, and I can’t really focus the same way on a screen.
Oh, and the anime about Go, Hikaru no Go, is really good (you should watch it even if you don’t care about the game).
That anime is one of my favorites. The main characters are pretty anime-ish, all anime protagonists from that time look more or less the same, but the older adults (apparently Go is a bit of an old person's game in Japan) are drawn in a more naturalistic style with a lot of character.
> in Go there’s this unspoken understanding that if you drive people away, you’ll have no one left to play with.
Definitively not in online Go. I ran into some people who clearly thought racist trash-talk was a way to reduce the competition.
> [...] spend our vacations at Go summer camp. The camp is actually a magical event.
I look forward to it the whole year. I've been going there for the past 20 years and been the main organizer the last 10 years. The magic happens by itself though.
Go is a wonderful game. My older brother bought a Go set when I was a little kid and we played together. Now, 65 years later I need to give him a 9 stone handicap (I cheated by taking lessons from a South Korean Go Master and studying several books), but thanks to the wonderful handicap system, games can still be fun even when players have very different skill levels.
I randomly tried a few exercises on the linked web site - nicely done!
Off topic, but I wrote a commercial Go playing program in the late 1970s. This was a great hobby.
Also notable is Sensei's Library (https://senseis.xmp.net) which is a very old and unbelievably thorough wiki on everything Go. It's a cool place to browse even if you don't play.
I became interested in learning Go recently after watching the magnificent AlphaGo movie [1] which is free on YouTube. I highly recommend giving it a watch if you haven't already.
Watching the human programmers become dumbfounded as AlphaGo invented novel Go-playing strategies... is what I remember most from having watched this a few years ago (right before GPT3.5/ChatGPT debuted). The algorithm makes [victorious] wildcard moves which no human player would even contemplate [stupid moves become masterplays].
When 9D-master Sudol attributes human qualities to the beauty of his AI opponent's creativity upon formulating certain moves... is definitely eye-opening. Hubris replaced.
I think with the rise of KataGo, its becoming clear that AlphaGo's "dumbfounded" strategies were instead incredibly strong tactical play with hilarious levels of blindness with regards to ladders.
It feels like modern AIs (like KataGo, which are hundreds of times better than AlphaGo) are getting closer to what humans consider appropriate strategic play.
Go players must be humble because if the opponent is stronger then the opponent wins. But Go AI Programmers don't necessarily have to be. Go AI programmers look for the weaknesses, lean upon them and yes, prove that AlphaGo/AlphaZero never learned ladders. Ever. Or other such concepts of strongly forcing moves (ex: loose ladders).
That's one of KataGo's biggest innovations. Explicitly programming a ladder solver so that simple ladders can indeed be factored in by the neural net.
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I do wonder how Lee Sodul will react if we told him that the superhuman AI he played could not see ladders... and had other such key weaknesses.
I learnt to play Go about 15 years ago, in university—never to a particularly high level, but it was a satisfying experience nonetheless. Much like learning to play a musical instrument, it teaches perseverance, discipline, and self-restraint while also letting you have fun. Back then there were many fewer online resources in English for learning Go. These days there's also professional-level commentary in English (Michael Redmond's youtube channel is particularly good).
There was an older guy running the local club at the university, a strong player who had a passion for teaching the game. This is in a small town in quite a remote area. I later heard he had learnt Go in the 1970s, first by reading books, then by meeting Japanese fishing crews who had come to the harbour to play. We're still friends today.
Go has many proverbs which act as rules of thumb for playing well (e.g. 'hane at the head of two stones'). IMO an underrated one is 'make friends playing Go'. As great as resources like the link are, I still prefer to play in person, over a board, for this reason.
Nice to see other go players here! Here are some go resources I like that I haven’t seen mentioned yet.
1. https://gomagic.org/ , it has free and paid content, and I learned a lot here.
2. The European go journal. A nice print publication, I’ve not lived in or near the Asian countries with a stronger go history so I’ve enjoyed getting printed problems and go news.
3. The “so you want to play go” book series by Jonathon Hop. I like his writing style.
Unfortunately, the early moves in the game ("Joseki") are the most important. They are also the most difficult to learn.
It is essential to study these tactics in this website... if only because they are the only "ground truth" known about Go. But for rapid improvement, the only real way forward is to play lots and lots of games to learn how the early game flows. Direction of play, which side of the board is most important and other such details.
Seems like a reasonably good tutorial in terms of layout. But just pointing out: joseki and direction of play is "more important" in terms of winning. Its just damn near impossible to teach so maybe its best for beginners to ignore this incredibly important (and difficult) subject.
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To put it in perhaps more concrete terms: playing a "tactic" position may net you +10 points across a sequence of 5 moves or so. (IE: One well placed tactical move, and ~4 followup moves may capture 5 enemy stones + 5 territory simultaneously from your opponent). However, every single early-game move is worth nearly +20 points of territory if played correctly. I'm serious.
That's why when you watch top-level Go play, there's a lot of "teleporting" across the 19x19 board, searching for the most important positions. And there is also very, very loose play and possible sacrifices / aji. (Maybe its not a true sacrifice, but you'd be willing to sacrifice if the opponent over-extends).
I disagree. For very high level play, yes, opening theory matters. For beginners, rote "reading", i.e. playing out moves in one's head, matters much more.
This is an unintuitive aspect of go because it is different from virtually every other strategy game. In most strategy games, "macro" (large scale logistics) is what determines winners at all levels of play, and then at higher levels where logistics skills are similar, small-scale tactics start to discriminate winner from loser. In low-level go, you'll find "micro" (small-scale battle tactics) determine the outcome of most games.
This is because of the "teleporting" you mention. When the opponent can materialise units and start a battle anywhere they want -- including inside your base -- small-scale tactics becomes important. (I once read the analogy that "if you were able to drop a siege tank into the opponent's main base at the start of the game, micro would end up determining low level StarCraft games too" -- only players that excel at local tactics would survive to see the end game with any base worth mentioning.)
For each hour of training, exercises in reading and local tactics is what will improve your rating the most. At least for the 20 or so first grades. Someone who is good at reading will obliterate all positions of someone who only knows the more subtle aspects.
> For beginners, rote "reading", i.e. playing out moves in one's head, matters much more.
In Go, I think everyone feels like they're a "beginner" for years.
In my experience, absolute beginners (30kyu or weaker) should study tactics. You have nothing else to study after all and need a baseline. But even by 20kyu or 15kyu, you _WILL_ stall out and be unable to continue if you're unable to recognize when a 2-point jump, horse move, running on the 4th line vs 3rd line is appropriate.
And you probably should be studying joseki theory in any case, because you need to start the game with _SOME_ move. And then you need to connect your opening theory with different, strategic level moves somehow.
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Is it not strange to you that there's a 50+ set tutorials with not a single one discussing the 1-point jump, horse move, or 2-point jump, or diagonal move?
This set of tutorials gets to Tiger Mouth (they call it a "hanging connection, section 3.11) before it gets to diagonal moves (ie: never).
There's no discussion on the appropriateness to sacrifice stones to gain momentum or territory. Etc. etc. This is perhaps more of a 10kyu level concept. But seriously, some of this stuff (ex: 2-point jump vs horse move) is simple enough for a 25kyu beginner.
> This is an unintuitive aspect of go because it is different from virtually every other strategy game.
No, it isn't.
As a decent chess and go player I can tell you that they're both just tactics until you approach the master/dan level.
And what is strategy if not just a longer form of tactical play?
At the end of the day, strategic play is just play that sets up tactics later on.
Or, to quote Fischer:
"Tactics flow from a superior position"
The Fischer quote sounds like the opposite of what you're saying, i.e. it's a suggestion to prioritise macro over micro: "from good logistics, tactics will sort itself out".
You could read it both ways. I would say tactical opportunities flow from a better position. If you're a good enough player that exploiting your tactical opportunities is automatic - and this doesn't apply even to most grandmasters - then you can afford to spend all your energies on creating those opportunities. If you're not good enough, creating strategically better positions is of limited value.
> No, it isn't. As a decent chess and go player I can tell you that they're both just tactics until you approach the master/dan level. And what is strategy if not just a longer form of tactical play?
You cannot tenuki in Chess.
In Go, especially at the 15kyu to 10kyu double-digit dan level, the opponents are full of opening and middle-game mistakes. The best response is often to ignore your opponent and play the most powerful move elsewhere on the board.
Knowing when to tenuki (ie: ignore the last move, play elsewhere) is a HUGE point in Go strategy. Its exceptionally difficult to play sente / forcing moves. Playing a sente vs gote sequence is what separates the 1-dan (experts maybe 1800+ Elo equivalent players) from the rest of us mere mortals. But recgonizing that the last move was gote (non-forcing) is maybe a 10kyu / 1200-Elo kind of thing.
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Chess is almost all tactics. Go on the other hand, is Strategic, as the concept of sente/gote/tenuki allows you to validly ignore the opponent's plan and work out your own plan.
You still need a solid tactical basis in Go. You cannot just run away from the opponent forever. But you might be surprised at how "valid" tenuki moves are.
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For me, the growth from 15kyu (maybe 1200 elo in Chess) to 9kyu was a strong focus on sente, gote, tenuki, strategy, joseki, direction of play, strong vs weak. All "strategic" play that often sacrifices local tactics for greater point gains elsewhere.
Indeed, "weak" play in Go (ex: a 2-point jump) is WEAKER in terms of tactics. You are explicitly making an area weaker and easier to kill in exchange for moving faster on the board. A 2-point jump will ALWAYS be the worse tactical choice than a 1-point jump or solid connection.
This isn't like in Chess where a sacrifice immediately becomes apparent either. It can take 50+ moves before a position is played out and the difference between strong-connected play vs a 2-point jump shows up.
In any case, even 20kyu beginners can improve their games if they play 2-point jumps (or other weak / loose patterns) appropriately. Yeah you need the basics of tactics there otherwise the 20kyu player just loses all their stones at all. But protecting your stones / strong play is actually very very weak and will trap you as a beginner. You MUST play faster (but weaker) connections if you want to break through double-digit-kyu. Players just get too strong by 9kyu or 8kyu to rely on tactics alone.
Fuseki (opening) doesn't matter much for most players. AI confirmed that a wide variety of openings, even weird ones far removed from the usual credo, work very well. At worst you may lose a couple points in doing so, but unless you play at a high level that's negligible and will never be the reason you lost.
Joseki (corner sequences) is also not that important, and certainly not something any beginner should spend time on. In fact, a common Go proverb is to "learn Joseki and lose two stones" (get weaker). We often see beginners learning Joseki, getting confused when their opponent doesn't follow the sequence they have in mind and ultimately blundering their corner. Or they ask "how to punish that?", without realizing that many moves are good even if they are not Joseki, and there's nothing to punish.
These tutorials don't even teach horse-move, 1-point jump or similar movements though.
With so much emphasis on cut and strong play, anyone completing this set of tutorials is going to be an absurdly strong tactician and then lose 20 points as the opponent horse-moves around the board.
Surely you've played the beginner who favors tactics and capture at the expense of easily captured territory? Given this set of tutorials, do you think any beginner will understand sente, gote and tenuki? And even if a beginner somehow understood it, what basis of play will they have? There's literally no tutorial or discussion on walls, influence, 2-point jump, 1-point jump, strong vs fast play (etc. etc.)
This is a discussion about the linked tutorials, is it not?
Look at the tutorials. Do you not see the lack of strategic discussion? Its evident from the outline.
There's no strategy here. There's no Joseki theory. There's no movement tutorial. There's no middle game, direction of play or other such tutorial.
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Like read the tutorials I'm trying to describe. They're full of sound tactical advice but any beginner who only uses this set of tutorials will have difficulty on the strategic aspects of their game. I think Joseki theory would help them very much (as well as many other kinds of tutorials or discussion).
There's nothing wrong with one online tutorial to focus on tactics. But its also important that any reader (especially the beginners who come into this discussion) realize what they're missing. Joseki is perhaps the most obvious missing element from this set of tutorials.
IE: Every beginner coming in here won't know what to do for their first move of a real game even if they complete this set of tactical tutorials.
I think your valuing of moves is flawed. Yes, during the fuseki the best move may be worth 20 points. But there are often many moves that may be worth 19 or 18 points. So, playing perfectly only gains a few points compared to playing acceptable moves.
In comparison, tactical situations often have a crucial move that wins many points - in low-level play swings of over a hundred points are not uncommon. There, missing the crucial move can lose the entire game, no matter how perfect the opening was played.
And does this set of tutorials give any idea of "best" or even "acceptable" moves?
There's no discussion of 2-point jump, 1-point jump, horse-move, diagonal move, loose play or connected/strong play in this set of tutorials. Or the value of 4th row (center-oriented influence play) vs 3rd row (edge-oriented territorial play). I'm not seeing any discussion on invasions or defense of invasions.
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I'm like 9kyu. I'm no expert. But I'm certainly at the level where tactical geniuses beat me in many positions, but I just wreck a lot of n00bs in the opening, and hold out until the ending.
The good news about opening theory or middle-game theory is that if the opponent is playing tenuki (ie: they ignore your most recent move and play somewhere else on the board), you're probably focused on the incorrect area.
On the other hand, if you're up vs a weaker player, YOU need to be the one playing tenuki. Its surprising how awful players are at double-digit kyu is at this. You will only see tenuki opportunities if you have superior opening/middle game skills than your opponent.
> Unfortunately, the early moves in the game ("Joseki") are the most important. They are also the most difficult to learn.
Nah, they aren't the most important (you can do without), not are the usual ones particularly difficult to learn.
Source: I'm a European 4 Dan.
(To expand on this: if you're a beginner, joseki don't matter. When you become a strong player (several of my friends are professional players), joseki is something you can usually come up with, or you come up with a similarly good non-joseki move, which is also ok. Practically, the game is usually decided in middle game fighting.)
> To put it in perhaps more concrete terms: playing a "tactic" position may net you +10 points across a sequence of 5 moves or so. (IE: One well placed tactical move, and ~4 followup moves may capture 5 enemy stones + 5 territory simultaneously from your opponent). However, every single early-game move is worth nearly +20 points of territory if played correctly. I'm serious.
I'm baffled by this comment. Both professional commentary and AI evaluation confirm that most joseki mistakes are very small, often on the order of 1-2 points, because the temperature is low. There are specific joseki that turn into fights (e.g. Taisha), and it is possible to lose 10-20 points in those, but first of all, it's typically possible to play conservatively and avoid those joseki, second, most errors in them are smaller, and third, mid-game fights end up being even bigger (an error in a capturing race can be an almost unlimited number of points, having 40 points at stake is common).
I'm curious what level you are? As a 4kyu (European), I can confidently say joseki is less important than reading up to my level. I believe stronger players say the same well into the amateur dan level.
I'm about 9 Kyu, at least back when I was practicing and reading every day.
I'd say that at 9 Kyu level, my main gains were playing and abusing Tenuki. Refusing to respond to the opponent's (weak) early game moves and instead playing significantly stronger elsewhere on the board.
If the opponent were stronger than me, I'd pay attention when they ignored my moves. Its actually very difficult IMO to play sente every time as a double-digit kyu (or even high-single digit kyu). Recognizing that the last move wasn't forcing and that playing elsewhere is a surprising way to get ahead.
Vs stronger opponents who can tell when the board is sente, gote, appropriate to Tenuki, and is able to count up Ko threats... well yeah. I lose. But there's significant skill in this part of the game and NOTHING in this set of tutorials that teaches it.
Nitpick: The early moves in the game are called fuseki. Joseki refers to well-studied local patterns of moves and they appear through the middle game, not just in the early game.
A couple of things I love about go is that you don't need to memorize fuseki, and that applying joseki correctly is as much a matter of judgment as it is of memory.
(I am a 1 dan go player but haven't played much in the last 15 years.)
He could be thinking of shogi (though the kanji is 定跡 where joseki from go is 定石), where joseki refers to the well studied ways to play the opening of the game.
Yes, at some point when people are somewhat able to take a decent lead home the fuseki becomes important.
Before that, beginners really need to understand how to „move“ their stones, how to defend and connect their groups and how to cut and capture.
If you see a strong player win against a weak player with a large handicap it always goes down the same way: the strong player places stones all over the board such that eventually many many skirmishes appear all over the board and then she is patient to take small advantage after small advantage, manifesting groups and territories out of what looks like thin air to the other player.
At a somewhat higher amateur level and above the fuseki again loses importance and the distinguishing factor is fighting skills and judgement, fuseki and prep just becomes table stakes.
This is very different to my experience and I am wondering why. Maybe because I come from chess and can't help myself to compare it with this frame of reference. Anyway I felt that my progress up to 5k was largely driven by a better understanding of principles of plays than tactical training. As a thought experiment, I feel that its possible to adopt a very risk averse style that negates tactical complexities to the expense of many points on the board and still largely win against weaker players. It's not my experience with chess. If you suck at tactics, your elo sucks too.
> Anyway I felt that my progress up to 5k was largely driven by a better understanding of principles of plays than tactical training.
Well yeah. But look at these tutorials. They're all local tactics. Nothing on early game or middle game strategy.
Despite dozens of tactical positions, I don't think a single one of these holds a one-point jump, two-point jump, horse move, diagonal move, 4-row move, 3-row move or similar pattern.
I'd say this stuff gets extremely important around 15kyu, where your tactical knowledge is passable (maybe not great, but passable). It becomes more important to move around the board with 2-point jumps, recognize sente vs gote and tenuki vs weak gote moves from your opponent.
Tactical knowledge will only get you maybe to 20kyu or 15kyu at the best IMO. Then you're forced to learn "squishy" and "opinionated" discussions that no one really knows how to teach. There's patterns (ie: 2-point jump or horse-move), but its not like there's any ground truth to knowing when these moves are appropriate.
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I guess people's point here is that if you choose a 2-point jump as a strategic connection when a horse-move was more appropriate, you might lose 1 or 2 points. But both of these moves are likely worth 5, 10, 15, or more points.
The more important bit is knowing when to play strong and connected (often because each move is strongly sente / has momentum and forces an opponent's response), vs when a sequence is gote and the opponent (or yourself) should consider a move elsewhere (ex: possibly start an invasion).
Far from it, there is no need to learn any joseki before dan level. It's even counterproductive often enough ("Learn joseki, lose two stones") before the player can study why each move is joseki and whole-board implications. A lot of it makes little sense before beginning to understand thickness and influence. A 1-dan should have strong enough tactics to play reasonable corner exchanges without any joseki knowledge, and won't be losing many games because of that.
Opening theory might be somehwat counter-productive. But surely SOMEWHERE in this tutorial the 1-point jump, horse-move, and 2-point jump need to be discussed.
One thing that stood out when I tried to learn and play Go was the tempo.
I'm a chess guy, and I like to play blitz with 5+0 and bullet (format equivalent to tik tok) so games tend to be frenetic, but it's quite rare to find a Go game on those formats, they tend to have 40+ min in time. And honestly, this is a big W for Go.
Blitz format is reasonably popular on KGS (once you get to a certain level) usually 10+0. Blitz is harder to find on Pandanet - but you can easily blitz on Fox.
I recently learned Go for the first time and I have played almost 50 games of 9x9 on Online Go Server so far. I’m finding it a lot of fun but it has been very humbling.
I learned chess in 7th or 8th grade and was easily able to get to about 700 Elo on chess.com after barely learning the rules, which is about the 60th percentile on the site. I only play a couple games a year now but can still hold my own against 1200 Elo opponents, which is in the 90th percentile.
I feel like I have put in just as much effort into learning Go. I bought a book and have been doing exercises. But I’m still in the 0.1 percentile on the site! (Yes, that’s not a typo.)
I’m sticking with it because it’s fun and that’s all that matters. But I definitely have a lot to learn.
The percentile stuff on chess.com has something funky going on with it. Lichess and Chess.com ratings are comparable (not the same, but at least ballpark comparable) and the median elo on lichess is about 1500. [1]
700 elo on chess.com is completely normal for a new player who knows the rules, but not much more. I have a good sized sample to back this up based on coaching classes of complete beginners and getting them to setup a class specific account.
Chess.com seems to have 1.3 million players with 100 ELO which is their hard cap minimum, so that is literally the same, if not worse, as a random move generator. So there has to be some weird bias there.
The average FIDE elo is 1550; chess.com's average of 1200 elo is much lower because it has many beginner players, including children. The gap between those is huge--much larger than the numbers may suggest. At chess.com 1200 elo people still have terrible board vision and routinely drop pieces; by the time one reaches FIDE 1550 elo that is no longer true and people are starting to plot out complex tactics requiring accurate visualization several moves ahead.
According to the elo formula, a 700 elo player is expected to "hold their own"--draw or win--against a 1200 elo player 1 in 19 games (so they will lose 18 of 19 games), and against a 1550 elo player 1 in 134 games (so they will lose 133 out of 134 games). A 1200 elo player is expected to "hold their own" against a 1550 elo player about 1 in 18 games (they will lose 17 out of 18 games). However, the chess.com and FIDE elos are from very different pools--1200 elo at chess.com is probably equivalent to about 600-800 elo FIDE.
I love Go and have played it a lot in person, but I always struggle to get games online, even on OGS. Feels like the online community is very small compared to chess (which is now my boardgame of choice, basically for this reason). Has this changed? Are there better sites now where a beginner can find matches without waiting half an hour or more?
My daughter has recently become obsessed with Go and now beats me half the time. I think that's good because Go helps her slow down and think before she acts.
I've been playing Go with my spouses brother for a while. He had a lot of free time to studyGo back then, I didn't. I couldn't get a single win out of him, still I enjoyed every single game.
We rarely play anymore, I should invite him over sometime :-)
I'm on the other side of this, meeting a friend two or three times a month to play Go and giving him a three stone handicap on a 13 by 13 board.
Sometimes I play a move with a huge, but hidden threat behind it. If he plays elsewhere instead of answering locally, I get to play a clever sequence and capture some stones. I could just wait for the blunder and win. Instead I give a quick lesson in tactics: here is my plan, if you want to play elsewhere, your move needs to have an even bigger threat behind it.
He is learning, and now I face my clever moves being player against me. This makes it harder for me to win (it is about 50:50 with the handicap), but also more fun for me to play.
You could ask your spouses brother for a "teaching game" or a larger handicap, or a bit of both.
I suspect that each player has a bowl of stones, and they have 1 lid that covers those bowls. After taking a turn, the player puts the lid over their own bowl so that the other player can easily see that its their turn.
"Drive by" game, to me, sounds like they've got the board set up somewhere in the house, and make moves over the course of a day (days?), rather than sitting across from each other and having dedicated time for the game.
I suspect they have two containers for pieces, and they put the one container lid on the container with their colour when they have played, revealing the other's pieces and indicating it is their turn to play.
I apologize to hijack this a bit, but do you know of similarly accessible resources about chess? So far the stuff I found online is either nerdy or explaining the basic moves to the children.
If you mean for the stuff after you know the basic rules of the game, I'd highly recommend Daniel Naroditsky's 'speed runs.' [1] Basically he starts at an extremely low rating and works his way up in an intentionally instructive/systematic way, often playing the same openings and what not.
It's extremely instructive for players at all levels.
Not really an answer, as I only tried it once, but there's a Chess course on Duolingo now. You can skip the very basic lessons and then it seemed to focus on positioning in openings.
> If you dislike chess because you don't like abstract total information strategy board games you will not like go
I think that's why I don't like chess. It seems to me that a winning strategy would be to think as far ahead as possible by enumerating all the permutations. A few heuristics exist however.
FWIW this isn't a path to success in chess, at least not for a human. There's something like 31 average moves per position in chess. So calculating just 5 moves deep would be 31^10 or about 820 billion positions. In fact even just 2 moves deep would be 31^4 = about a million positions. I'm a relatively strong player and ballparking my speed by playing through the famous Morphy opera house game in my mind - I'm hitting around 2-3 positions per second, in a game I know intimately.
Progress in chess (and I assume Go) is about training your subconscious so that your mind naturally pushes you in the right direction with minimal effort. Think about something like writing. When you're writing something you aren't really thinking through each word in your vocabulary, comparing them, and picking one - it all just kind of flows without you even trying. The same thing happens with chess mastery.
This is why some people say you're not "really" playing chess before a rather high rating. Less experienced players will struggle to simply not leave material hanging. Then as they improve that will no longer be an issue but then they'll still struggle to avoid simple tactical ideas. But once you move comfortably beyond that phase, the game becomes much more about the things people want it to be about - strategy, plans, big picture stuff that's lots of fun. It's one of the way the game draws you in - it gets more and more addictive, and rewarding, the better you become at it!
The neat thing about Go is that, whilst the winning strategy is exactly to think ahead and enumerate all possible positions, to do so is impossible. (Even the superhuman AI fudge it. They can just read farther ahead than humans.)
So to do well you have to learn how to support your reading ahead with heuristics and a feel for the game.
A famous amateur player and advocate for the game once went through all the game records of Go Seigen in order to digitize them. This means having to pore over hand-written diagrams looking for the next number in the sequence of moves. Obviously this is easier if you can guess where to look. But, if you guess them all correctly, then you are playing just as well as the old master! After spending a good few months on the task, he was a significantly better player!
Nice. As systems become more and more complicated (like real world itself) it is no longer feasible to enumerate all permutations but rather get a feel for the patterns - an intuition. A skilled intuiter (?) would know the subtle ways in which patterns emerge.
I don't like chess, but like go. Go feels way more free form. In chess it feels like every move has been played already and has a name. I feel like I need to study up on all of it. In go there's so many possibilities, I just play something interesting and see where it takes me.
Honestly just give it a go. :)
I like go and don't like chess, for the simple reason that getting good at chess requires a lot of memorization, while getting good at go doesn't. Having lots of openings and positions memorized to know the best moves automatically is not something that I personally find fun.
In go there are some sequences of "standard" moves (joseki) but it's highly controversial whether memorizing them even helps at all, see another thread in this same comments section.
Opening knowledge in chess is almost entirely unnecessary below a rather high level, perhaps 2200+.
The reason less experienced players get obsessed with openings is because they make regular tactical mistakes in the opening, and then blame lack of opening knowledge, as opposed to their lack of tactical ability. In other words they try to memorize their way out of tactical mistakes, which is impossible. At that point, after it inevitably fails to work, they claim they've plateaued, lack the IQ, maybe the memory, maybe are too old, or whatever other excuse.
This is made even worse by the fact that opening knowledge is ostensibly easy to improve whereas tactical vision seems very difficult to improve. In reality it's the exact opposite. Exact opening lines will fade from your mind rapidly (though general ideas will stay with you forever - but that's another topic), whereas grinding tactics might not 'feel' like you've learned anything, but overtime will permanently train your intuition to where it needs to be to start seeing major gains.
On top of all of this - one could simply play 'freestyle' chess (the starting pieces locations are randomized) and suddenly there is 0 opening theory. But you'll find that your freestyle rating is going to be strongly proportional to your 'normal' chess rating!
I heavily dislike the auto-generated translations. They sound weird and make the website look cheap. I would rather you provided no translations and maybe let those less comfortable with English among us use their browser's auto-translate feature. Also, I'm sure there are several volunteers out there who would gladly translate this amazing resource for free.
This is nice, it's okay, but things like this have really decreased in quality and utility since Flash went away and the partial replacement of javascript took over. The old online-go "Learn Go" implemented in flash much, much better and more intuitive and interactive than this.
I first learned to play Go back in university, but never got very good (it was competing with learning how to program). Many years later, shortly after the war in Ukraine started, I was looking for an activity to share with my 8-year-old son. Life was chaotic then: everyone was anxious, we were hosting a refugee lady, and I could see the stress taking a toll on him. I wanted something where it would be clear we shouldn’t be disturbed – and Go fit perfectly. We started playing, and it was fun. One of the great things about Go is its elegant handicap system, which makes it possible for players at very different levels to still enjoy a fair, challenging game.
Since then, we’ve been going to the local Go club in Warsaw, and it’s become our main hobby. We play each other almost daily, travel to tournaments (sometimes abroad), and even spend our vacations at Go summer camp.
The camp is actually a magical event. It takes place at a campsite in the middle of the Kaszuby Lake District. The conditions are spartan – you either live in a tent or a five-person cabin, and hot water is scarce. But the crowd that gathers there is incredible. Over breakfast you might get an impromptu intro to lambda calculus, in the evening you might end up in a deep philosophical conversation, or hear travel stories from far-off places, or suddenly learn way more about knitting than you thought possible. When we first went, it felt like discovering our long-lost family.
The Go community is much smaller than chess, but also far more tight-knit and welcoming. I’ve heard chess can be more cutthroat, while in Go there’s this unspoken understanding that if you drive people away, you’ll have no one left to play with.
When I travel, I like to drop in on local Go clubs. It’s always been a great experience – I especially enjoyed visiting the San Francisco Go Club in Japantown.
I play almost exclusively over the board. I prefer long, thoughtful games, and I can’t really focus the same way on a screen.
Oh, and the anime about Go, Hikaru no Go, is really good (you should watch it even if you don’t care about the game).
That anime is one of my favorites. The main characters are pretty anime-ish, all anime protagonists from that time look more or less the same, but the older adults (apparently Go is a bit of an old person's game in Japan) are drawn in a more naturalistic style with a lot of character.
> in Go there’s this unspoken understanding that if you drive people away, you’ll have no one left to play with.
Definitively not in online Go. I ran into some people who clearly thought racist trash-talk was a way to reduce the competition.
> [...] spend our vacations at Go summer camp. The camp is actually a magical event.
I look forward to it the whole year. I've been going there for the past 20 years and been the main organizer the last 10 years. The magic happens by itself though.
Hikaru no Go manga is super good too. Aged very well as well. Manga/Anime from that time usually has some problematic stereotypes/scenes.
Heh, HnG definitely does think all Koreans have slits for eyes.
> Oh, and the anime about Go, Hikaru no Go, is really good (you should watch it even if you don’t care about the game).
I really enjoyed the Chinese drama adaptation of this - more so than the original anime somehow.
https://mydramalist.com/45437-qi-hun
There is no such thing as Kaszuby Lake District wtf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashubian_Lake_District
Go is a wonderful game. My older brother bought a Go set when I was a little kid and we played together. Now, 65 years later I need to give him a 9 stone handicap (I cheated by taking lessons from a South Korean Go Master and studying several books), but thanks to the wonderful handicap system, games can still be fun even when players have very different skill levels.
I randomly tried a few exercises on the linked web site - nicely done!
Off topic, but I wrote a commercial Go playing program in the late 1970s. This was a great hobby.
By chance I used this just a few weeks ago when I started learning to play Go. It's a pretty good resource!
Personally, my favorite tutorial I went through was The Interactive Way to Go (https://way-to-go.gitlab.io)
Also notable is Sensei's Library (https://senseis.xmp.net) which is a very old and unbelievably thorough wiki on everything Go. It's a cool place to browse even if you don't play.
I became interested in learning Go recently after watching the magnificent AlphaGo movie [1] which is free on YouTube. I highly recommend giving it a watch if you haven't already.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y
Watching the human programmers become dumbfounded as AlphaGo invented novel Go-playing strategies... is what I remember most from having watched this a few years ago (right before GPT3.5/ChatGPT debuted). The algorithm makes [victorious] wildcard moves which no human player would even contemplate [stupid moves become masterplays].
When 9D-master Sudol attributes human qualities to the beauty of his AI opponent's creativity upon formulating certain moves... is definitely eye-opening. Hubris replaced.
Nah.
I think with the rise of KataGo, its becoming clear that AlphaGo's "dumbfounded" strategies were instead incredibly strong tactical play with hilarious levels of blindness with regards to ladders.
It feels like modern AIs (like KataGo, which are hundreds of times better than AlphaGo) are getting closer to what humans consider appropriate strategic play.
Go players must be humble because if the opponent is stronger then the opponent wins. But Go AI Programmers don't necessarily have to be. Go AI programmers look for the weaknesses, lean upon them and yes, prove that AlphaGo/AlphaZero never learned ladders. Ever. Or other such concepts of strongly forcing moves (ex: loose ladders).
That's one of KataGo's biggest innovations. Explicitly programming a ladder solver so that simple ladders can indeed be factored in by the neural net.
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I do wonder how Lee Sodul will react if we told him that the superhuman AI he played could not see ladders... and had other such key weaknesses.
Wow, that was incredible. I cried when Lee Sedol won game 4. And his and Fan Hui's philosophical takes were remarkable.
Across years of play, the only game of go I won, was a win by default at inter university go in the UK when my opponent didn't show up.
I even lost the game I played with my son, teaching him the moves.
It's a great game.
To learn the basics of Go you have to lose your first 100 games
I learnt to play Go about 15 years ago, in university—never to a particularly high level, but it was a satisfying experience nonetheless. Much like learning to play a musical instrument, it teaches perseverance, discipline, and self-restraint while also letting you have fun. Back then there were many fewer online resources in English for learning Go. These days there's also professional-level commentary in English (Michael Redmond's youtube channel is particularly good).
There was an older guy running the local club at the university, a strong player who had a passion for teaching the game. This is in a small town in quite a remote area. I later heard he had learnt Go in the 1970s, first by reading books, then by meeting Japanese fishing crews who had come to the harbour to play. We're still friends today.
Go has many proverbs which act as rules of thumb for playing well (e.g. 'hane at the head of two stones'). IMO an underrated one is 'make friends playing Go'. As great as resources like the link are, I still prefer to play in person, over a board, for this reason.
I'm a big fan of local proverbs / vernacular in go, enough to ask about them on Reddit quite a few years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/baduk/comments/7fgru4/local_go_vern...
Maybe you'll find them useful or fun :)
Nice to see other go players here! Here are some go resources I like that I haven’t seen mentioned yet.
1. https://gomagic.org/ , it has free and paid content, and I learned a lot here.
2. The European go journal. A nice print publication, I’ve not lived in or near the Asian countries with a stronger go history so I’ve enjoyed getting printed problems and go news.
3. The “so you want to play go” book series by Jonathon Hop. I like his writing style.
Unfortunately, the early moves in the game ("Joseki") are the most important. They are also the most difficult to learn.
It is essential to study these tactics in this website... if only because they are the only "ground truth" known about Go. But for rapid improvement, the only real way forward is to play lots and lots of games to learn how the early game flows. Direction of play, which side of the board is most important and other such details.
Seems like a reasonably good tutorial in terms of layout. But just pointing out: joseki and direction of play is "more important" in terms of winning. Its just damn near impossible to teach so maybe its best for beginners to ignore this incredibly important (and difficult) subject.
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To put it in perhaps more concrete terms: playing a "tactic" position may net you +10 points across a sequence of 5 moves or so. (IE: One well placed tactical move, and ~4 followup moves may capture 5 enemy stones + 5 territory simultaneously from your opponent). However, every single early-game move is worth nearly +20 points of territory if played correctly. I'm serious.
That's why when you watch top-level Go play, there's a lot of "teleporting" across the 19x19 board, searching for the most important positions. And there is also very, very loose play and possible sacrifices / aji. (Maybe its not a true sacrifice, but you'd be willing to sacrifice if the opponent over-extends).
I disagree. For very high level play, yes, opening theory matters. For beginners, rote "reading", i.e. playing out moves in one's head, matters much more.
This is an unintuitive aspect of go because it is different from virtually every other strategy game. In most strategy games, "macro" (large scale logistics) is what determines winners at all levels of play, and then at higher levels where logistics skills are similar, small-scale tactics start to discriminate winner from loser. In low-level go, you'll find "micro" (small-scale battle tactics) determine the outcome of most games.
This is because of the "teleporting" you mention. When the opponent can materialise units and start a battle anywhere they want -- including inside your base -- small-scale tactics becomes important. (I once read the analogy that "if you were able to drop a siege tank into the opponent's main base at the start of the game, micro would end up determining low level StarCraft games too" -- only players that excel at local tactics would survive to see the end game with any base worth mentioning.)
For each hour of training, exercises in reading and local tactics is what will improve your rating the most. At least for the 20 or so first grades. Someone who is good at reading will obliterate all positions of someone who only knows the more subtle aspects.
> For beginners, rote "reading", i.e. playing out moves in one's head, matters much more.
In Go, I think everyone feels like they're a "beginner" for years.
In my experience, absolute beginners (30kyu or weaker) should study tactics. You have nothing else to study after all and need a baseline. But even by 20kyu or 15kyu, you _WILL_ stall out and be unable to continue if you're unable to recognize when a 2-point jump, horse move, running on the 4th line vs 3rd line is appropriate.
And you probably should be studying joseki theory in any case, because you need to start the game with _SOME_ move. And then you need to connect your opening theory with different, strategic level moves somehow.
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Is it not strange to you that there's a 50+ set tutorials with not a single one discussing the 1-point jump, horse move, or 2-point jump, or diagonal move?
This set of tutorials gets to Tiger Mouth (they call it a "hanging connection, section 3.11) before it gets to diagonal moves (ie: never).
There's no discussion on the appropriateness to sacrifice stones to gain momentum or territory. Etc. etc. This is perhaps more of a 10kyu level concept. But seriously, some of this stuff (ex: 2-point jump vs horse move) is simple enough for a 25kyu beginner.
> This is an unintuitive aspect of go because it is different from virtually every other strategy game.
No, it isn't. As a decent chess and go player I can tell you that they're both just tactics until you approach the master/dan level. And what is strategy if not just a longer form of tactical play?
At the end of the day, strategic play is just play that sets up tactics later on.
Or, to quote Fischer: "Tactics flow from a superior position"
The Fischer quote sounds like the opposite of what you're saying, i.e. it's a suggestion to prioritise macro over micro: "from good logistics, tactics will sort itself out".
You could read it both ways. I would say tactical opportunities flow from a better position. If you're a good enough player that exploiting your tactical opportunities is automatic - and this doesn't apply even to most grandmasters - then you can afford to spend all your energies on creating those opportunities. If you're not good enough, creating strategically better positions is of limited value.
> No, it isn't. As a decent chess and go player I can tell you that they're both just tactics until you approach the master/dan level. And what is strategy if not just a longer form of tactical play?
You cannot tenuki in Chess.
In Go, especially at the 15kyu to 10kyu double-digit dan level, the opponents are full of opening and middle-game mistakes. The best response is often to ignore your opponent and play the most powerful move elsewhere on the board.
Knowing when to tenuki (ie: ignore the last move, play elsewhere) is a HUGE point in Go strategy. Its exceptionally difficult to play sente / forcing moves. Playing a sente vs gote sequence is what separates the 1-dan (experts maybe 1800+ Elo equivalent players) from the rest of us mere mortals. But recgonizing that the last move was gote (non-forcing) is maybe a 10kyu / 1200-Elo kind of thing.
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Chess is almost all tactics. Go on the other hand, is Strategic, as the concept of sente/gote/tenuki allows you to validly ignore the opponent's plan and work out your own plan.
You still need a solid tactical basis in Go. You cannot just run away from the opponent forever. But you might be surprised at how "valid" tenuki moves are.
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For me, the growth from 15kyu (maybe 1200 elo in Chess) to 9kyu was a strong focus on sente, gote, tenuki, strategy, joseki, direction of play, strong vs weak. All "strategic" play that often sacrifices local tactics for greater point gains elsewhere.
Indeed, "weak" play in Go (ex: a 2-point jump) is WEAKER in terms of tactics. You are explicitly making an area weaker and easier to kill in exchange for moving faster on the board. A 2-point jump will ALWAYS be the worse tactical choice than a 1-point jump or solid connection.
This isn't like in Chess where a sacrifice immediately becomes apparent either. It can take 50+ moves before a position is played out and the difference between strong-connected play vs a 2-point jump shows up.
In any case, even 20kyu beginners can improve their games if they play 2-point jumps (or other weak / loose patterns) appropriately. Yeah you need the basics of tactics there otherwise the 20kyu player just loses all their stones at all. But protecting your stones / strong play is actually very very weak and will trap you as a beginner. You MUST play faster (but weaker) connections if you want to break through double-digit-kyu. Players just get too strong by 9kyu or 8kyu to rely on tactics alone.
Highly disagree.
Fuseki (opening) doesn't matter much for most players. AI confirmed that a wide variety of openings, even weird ones far removed from the usual credo, work very well. At worst you may lose a couple points in doing so, but unless you play at a high level that's negligible and will never be the reason you lost.
Joseki (corner sequences) is also not that important, and certainly not something any beginner should spend time on. In fact, a common Go proverb is to "learn Joseki and lose two stones" (get weaker). We often see beginners learning Joseki, getting confused when their opponent doesn't follow the sequence they have in mind and ultimately blundering their corner. Or they ask "how to punish that?", without realizing that many moves are good even if they are not Joseki, and there's nothing to punish.
These tutorials don't even teach horse-move, 1-point jump or similar movements though.
With so much emphasis on cut and strong play, anyone completing this set of tutorials is going to be an absurdly strong tactician and then lose 20 points as the opponent horse-moves around the board.
Surely you've played the beginner who favors tactics and capture at the expense of easily captured territory? Given this set of tutorials, do you think any beginner will understand sente, gote and tenuki? And even if a beginner somehow understood it, what basis of play will they have? There's literally no tutorial or discussion on walls, influence, 2-point jump, 1-point jump, strong vs fast play (etc. etc.)
Sorry if I'm missing something but are you responding to the right comment? Your answer doesn't seem related to what I said.
I'm also not sure how that relates to your earlier point about "Joseki", which I was disputing (like many others).
This is a discussion about the linked tutorials, is it not?
Look at the tutorials. Do you not see the lack of strategic discussion? Its evident from the outline.
There's no strategy here. There's no Joseki theory. There's no movement tutorial. There's no middle game, direction of play or other such tutorial.
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Like read the tutorials I'm trying to describe. They're full of sound tactical advice but any beginner who only uses this set of tutorials will have difficulty on the strategic aspects of their game. I think Joseki theory would help them very much (as well as many other kinds of tutorials or discussion).
There's nothing wrong with one online tutorial to focus on tactics. But its also important that any reader (especially the beginners who come into this discussion) realize what they're missing. Joseki is perhaps the most obvious missing element from this set of tutorials.
IE: Every beginner coming in here won't know what to do for their first move of a real game even if they complete this set of tactical tutorials.
I think your valuing of moves is flawed. Yes, during the fuseki the best move may be worth 20 points. But there are often many moves that may be worth 19 or 18 points. So, playing perfectly only gains a few points compared to playing acceptable moves. In comparison, tactical situations often have a crucial move that wins many points - in low-level play swings of over a hundred points are not uncommon. There, missing the crucial move can lose the entire game, no matter how perfect the opening was played.
And does this set of tutorials give any idea of "best" or even "acceptable" moves?
There's no discussion of 2-point jump, 1-point jump, horse-move, diagonal move, loose play or connected/strong play in this set of tutorials. Or the value of 4th row (center-oriented influence play) vs 3rd row (edge-oriented territorial play). I'm not seeing any discussion on invasions or defense of invasions.
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I'm like 9kyu. I'm no expert. But I'm certainly at the level where tactical geniuses beat me in many positions, but I just wreck a lot of n00bs in the opening, and hold out until the ending.
The good news about opening theory or middle-game theory is that if the opponent is playing tenuki (ie: they ignore your most recent move and play somewhere else on the board), you're probably focused on the incorrect area.
On the other hand, if you're up vs a weaker player, YOU need to be the one playing tenuki. Its surprising how awful players are at double-digit kyu is at this. You will only see tenuki opportunities if you have superior opening/middle game skills than your opponent.
> Unfortunately, the early moves in the game ("Joseki") are the most important. They are also the most difficult to learn.
Nah, they aren't the most important (you can do without), not are the usual ones particularly difficult to learn.
Source: I'm a European 4 Dan.
(To expand on this: if you're a beginner, joseki don't matter. When you become a strong player (several of my friends are professional players), joseki is something you can usually come up with, or you come up with a similarly good non-joseki move, which is also ok. Practically, the game is usually decided in middle game fighting.)
> To put it in perhaps more concrete terms: playing a "tactic" position may net you +10 points across a sequence of 5 moves or so. (IE: One well placed tactical move, and ~4 followup moves may capture 5 enemy stones + 5 territory simultaneously from your opponent). However, every single early-game move is worth nearly +20 points of territory if played correctly. I'm serious.
I'm baffled by this comment. Both professional commentary and AI evaluation confirm that most joseki mistakes are very small, often on the order of 1-2 points, because the temperature is low. There are specific joseki that turn into fights (e.g. Taisha), and it is possible to lose 10-20 points in those, but first of all, it's typically possible to play conservatively and avoid those joseki, second, most errors in them are smaller, and third, mid-game fights end up being even bigger (an error in a capturing race can be an almost unlimited number of points, having 40 points at stake is common).
I'm curious what level you are? As a 4kyu (European), I can confidently say joseki is less important than reading up to my level. I believe stronger players say the same well into the amateur dan level.
I'm about 9 Kyu, at least back when I was practicing and reading every day.
I'd say that at 9 Kyu level, my main gains were playing and abusing Tenuki. Refusing to respond to the opponent's (weak) early game moves and instead playing significantly stronger elsewhere on the board.
If the opponent were stronger than me, I'd pay attention when they ignored my moves. Its actually very difficult IMO to play sente every time as a double-digit kyu (or even high-single digit kyu). Recognizing that the last move wasn't forcing and that playing elsewhere is a surprising way to get ahead.
Vs stronger opponents who can tell when the board is sente, gote, appropriate to Tenuki, and is able to count up Ko threats... well yeah. I lose. But there's significant skill in this part of the game and NOTHING in this set of tutorials that teaches it.
Nitpick: The early moves in the game are called fuseki. Joseki refers to well-studied local patterns of moves and they appear through the middle game, not just in the early game.
A couple of things I love about go is that you don't need to memorize fuseki, and that applying joseki correctly is as much a matter of judgment as it is of memory.
(I am a 1 dan go player but haven't played much in the last 15 years.)
He could be thinking of shogi (though the kanji is 定跡 where joseki from go is 定石), where joseki refers to the well studied ways to play the opening of the game.
I don’t share that sentiment.
Yes, at some point when people are somewhat able to take a decent lead home the fuseki becomes important. Before that, beginners really need to understand how to „move“ their stones, how to defend and connect their groups and how to cut and capture.
If you see a strong player win against a weak player with a large handicap it always goes down the same way: the strong player places stones all over the board such that eventually many many skirmishes appear all over the board and then she is patient to take small advantage after small advantage, manifesting groups and territories out of what looks like thin air to the other player.
At a somewhat higher amateur level and above the fuseki again loses importance and the distinguishing factor is fighting skills and judgement, fuseki and prep just becomes table stakes.
This is very different to my experience and I am wondering why. Maybe because I come from chess and can't help myself to compare it with this frame of reference. Anyway I felt that my progress up to 5k was largely driven by a better understanding of principles of plays than tactical training. As a thought experiment, I feel that its possible to adopt a very risk averse style that negates tactical complexities to the expense of many points on the board and still largely win against weaker players. It's not my experience with chess. If you suck at tactics, your elo sucks too.
> Anyway I felt that my progress up to 5k was largely driven by a better understanding of principles of plays than tactical training.
Well yeah. But look at these tutorials. They're all local tactics. Nothing on early game or middle game strategy.
Despite dozens of tactical positions, I don't think a single one of these holds a one-point jump, two-point jump, horse move, diagonal move, 4-row move, 3-row move or similar pattern.
I'd say this stuff gets extremely important around 15kyu, where your tactical knowledge is passable (maybe not great, but passable). It becomes more important to move around the board with 2-point jumps, recognize sente vs gote and tenuki vs weak gote moves from your opponent.
Tactical knowledge will only get you maybe to 20kyu or 15kyu at the best IMO. Then you're forced to learn "squishy" and "opinionated" discussions that no one really knows how to teach. There's patterns (ie: 2-point jump or horse-move), but its not like there's any ground truth to knowing when these moves are appropriate.
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I guess people's point here is that if you choose a 2-point jump as a strategic connection when a horse-move was more appropriate, you might lose 1 or 2 points. But both of these moves are likely worth 5, 10, 15, or more points.
The more important bit is knowing when to play strong and connected (often because each move is strongly sente / has momentum and forces an opponent's response), vs when a sequence is gote and the opponent (or yourself) should consider a move elsewhere (ex: possibly start an invasion).
Far from it, there is no need to learn any joseki before dan level. It's even counterproductive often enough ("Learn joseki, lose two stones") before the player can study why each move is joseki and whole-board implications. A lot of it makes little sense before beginning to understand thickness and influence. A 1-dan should have strong enough tactics to play reasonable corner exchanges without any joseki knowledge, and won't be losing many games because of that.
Opening theory might be somehwat counter-productive. But surely SOMEWHERE in this tutorial the 1-point jump, horse-move, and 2-point jump need to be discussed.
I think is the best Go tutorial to learn the rules: https://www.learn-go.net
This is pretty well made. The progression is good and there are no distractions. And best part it doesn't force you to create an account.
Yes, but without an account, at least on mobile, you can't change any settings besides light/dark mode and language, which is pretty annoying.
One thing that stood out when I tried to learn and play Go was the tempo.
I'm a chess guy, and I like to play blitz with 5+0 and bullet (format equivalent to tik tok) so games tend to be frenetic, but it's quite rare to find a Go game on those formats, they tend to have 40+ min in time. And honestly, this is a big W for Go.
Blitz format is reasonably popular on KGS (once you get to a certain level) usually 10+0. Blitz is harder to find on Pandanet - but you can easily blitz on Fox.
I recently learned Go for the first time and I have played almost 50 games of 9x9 on Online Go Server so far. I’m finding it a lot of fun but it has been very humbling.
I learned chess in 7th or 8th grade and was easily able to get to about 700 Elo on chess.com after barely learning the rules, which is about the 60th percentile on the site. I only play a couple games a year now but can still hold my own against 1200 Elo opponents, which is in the 90th percentile.
I feel like I have put in just as much effort into learning Go. I bought a book and have been doing exercises. But I’m still in the 0.1 percentile on the site! (Yes, that’s not a typo.)
I’m sticking with it because it’s fun and that’s all that matters. But I definitely have a lot to learn.
The percentile stuff on chess.com has something funky going on with it. Lichess and Chess.com ratings are comparable (not the same, but at least ballpark comparable) and the median elo on lichess is about 1500. [1]
700 elo on chess.com is completely normal for a new player who knows the rules, but not much more. I have a good sized sample to back this up based on coaching classes of complete beginners and getting them to setup a class specific account.
Chess.com seems to have 1.3 million players with 100 ELO which is their hard cap minimum, so that is literally the same, if not worse, as a random move generator. So there has to be some weird bias there.
[1] - https://lichess.org/stat/rating/distribution/rapid
The average FIDE elo is 1550; chess.com's average of 1200 elo is much lower because it has many beginner players, including children. The gap between those is huge--much larger than the numbers may suggest. At chess.com 1200 elo people still have terrible board vision and routinely drop pieces; by the time one reaches FIDE 1550 elo that is no longer true and people are starting to plot out complex tactics requiring accurate visualization several moves ahead.
According to the elo formula, a 700 elo player is expected to "hold their own"--draw or win--against a 1200 elo player 1 in 19 games (so they will lose 18 of 19 games), and against a 1550 elo player 1 in 134 games (so they will lose 133 out of 134 games). A 1200 elo player is expected to "hold their own" against a 1550 elo player about 1 in 18 games (they will lose 17 out of 18 games). However, the chess.com and FIDE elos are from very different pools--1200 elo at chess.com is probably equivalent to about 600-800 elo FIDE.
> The average FIDE elo is 1550; chess.com's average of 1200 elo is much lower because it has many beginner players, including children.
Why would that lower the average elo? Elo is a conserved quantity: for you to gain points, your opponent must lose that many points, and vice versa.
So there are two obvious facts about the average rating:
1. In a closed system, the average rating can never change, not up or down, not by any infinitesimal fraction of a point.
2. In an open system, the average rating can change, but for it to go down would require players with an above-average rating to leave the system.
In the much more common scenario where beginners come in, lose a bunch of games, and then leave, the average rating will go up over time.
> Why would that lower the average elo?
Because the average chess.com player is considerably weaker than the average FIDE player.
> In the much more common scenario where beginners come in, lose a bunch of games, and then leave, the average rating will go up over time.
Weak players come into the chess.com pool faster than they leave.
The skill that transfers from chess to go is reading -- "if I play here, my opponent is likely to play there, and then I will..."
why is this downvoted?
I love Go and have played it a lot in person, but I always struggle to get games online, even on OGS. Feels like the online community is very small compared to chess (which is now my boardgame of choice, basically for this reason). Has this changed? Are there better sites now where a beginner can find matches without waiting half an hour or more?
It's easier to get games on Pandanet https://pandanet-igs.com/communities/pandanet and Fox Weiqi https://www.foxwq.com. You can run Fox on OS X w/ Parallels or Crossover. It supposedly possible with Wine but I could never get it to work.
Do your settings allow for handicapped games? This increases pool of potential opponents.
My personal preference is to play non-handicapped games, but that's a good point, thanks.
There are more people on kgs and on fox go server
I wouldn't say so for KGS, especially for beginners. OGS is the go-to for western servers nowadays.
Fox, without a doubt. I recommend Weiqihubb for a quick-access app to asian servers on all platforms, with puzzles (https://walruswq.com/WeiqiHub).
Thanks, I'll check those out.
My daughter has recently become obsessed with Go and now beats me half the time. I think that's good because Go helps her slow down and think before she acts.
I lesson I have yet to learn (along with everyone on the Fox go server, presumably)
Just idly clicking through until I got to “Ko”. I had no idea Go was stateful!
It's not supposed to be stateful. The ko rule is only there to block infinite loops.
What I mean is you can’t just look at a board and know the ko “state” - but yes I’m sure in practice it’s not that important.
Just my engineering brain picking up on it.
Love to see the objectively better Go on HN now and then too ;)
I've been playing Go with my spouses brother for a while. He had a lot of free time to studyGo back then, I didn't. I couldn't get a single win out of him, still I enjoyed every single game.
We rarely play anymore, I should invite him over sometime :-)
I'm on the other side of this, meeting a friend two or three times a month to play Go and giving him a three stone handicap on a 13 by 13 board.
Sometimes I play a move with a huge, but hidden threat behind it. If he plays elsewhere instead of answering locally, I get to play a clever sequence and capture some stones. I could just wait for the blunder and win. Instead I give a quick lesson in tactics: here is my plan, if you want to play elsewhere, your move needs to have an even bigger threat behind it.
He is learning, and now I face my clever moves being player against me. This makes it harder for me to win (it is about 50:50 with the handicap), but also more fun for me to play.
You could ask your spouses brother for a "teaching game" or a larger handicap, or a bit of both.
Go is a great game, my wife and I always have a drive-by game going, we use 1 lid and swap it after we place a stone.
> we use 1 lid and swap it after we place a stone.
What does "lid" mean here?
I suspect that each player has a bowl of stones, and they have 1 lid that covers those bowls. After taking a turn, the player puts the lid over their own bowl so that the other player can easily see that its their turn.
"Drive by" game, to me, sounds like they've got the board set up somewhere in the house, and make moves over the course of a day (days?), rather than sitting across from each other and having dedicated time for the game.
I suspect they have two containers for pieces, and they put the one container lid on the container with their colour when they have played, revealing the other's pieces and indicating it is their turn to play.
It took me a bit to decode also.
I apologize to hijack this a bit, but do you know of similarly accessible resources about chess? So far the stuff I found online is either nerdy or explaining the basic moves to the children.
If you mean for the stuff after you know the basic rules of the game, I'd highly recommend Daniel Naroditsky's 'speed runs.' [1] Basically he starts at an extremely low rating and works his way up in an intentionally instructive/systematic way, often playing the same openings and what not.
It's extremely instructive for players at all levels.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/@DanielNaroditskyGM/playlists
This is very similar for Chess: https://lichess.org/learn
Source: I am playing both Go on OGS and chess on Lichess.
Not really an answer, as I only tried it once, but there's a Chess course on Duolingo now. You can skip the very basic lessons and then it seemed to focus on positioning in openings.
Will I like go if I don’t like chess? Chess seems too one dimensional for me if that makes sense.
Only one way to find out.
If you dislike chess because you don't like abstract total information strategy board games you will not like go. If you dislike chess because
- it has too many rules,
- the board is too smalll,
- the pieces move around too much, or
- it doesn't involve adversarial, collaborative construction,
or any of the other things that make go different from chess, you have a chance of liking go.
> If you dislike chess because you don't like abstract total information strategy board games you will not like go
I think that's why I don't like chess. It seems to me that a winning strategy would be to think as far ahead as possible by enumerating all the permutations. A few heuristics exist however.
FWIW this isn't a path to success in chess, at least not for a human. There's something like 31 average moves per position in chess. So calculating just 5 moves deep would be 31^10 or about 820 billion positions. In fact even just 2 moves deep would be 31^4 = about a million positions. I'm a relatively strong player and ballparking my speed by playing through the famous Morphy opera house game in my mind - I'm hitting around 2-3 positions per second, in a game I know intimately.
Progress in chess (and I assume Go) is about training your subconscious so that your mind naturally pushes you in the right direction with minimal effort. Think about something like writing. When you're writing something you aren't really thinking through each word in your vocabulary, comparing them, and picking one - it all just kind of flows without you even trying. The same thing happens with chess mastery.
This is why some people say you're not "really" playing chess before a rather high rating. Less experienced players will struggle to simply not leave material hanging. Then as they improve that will no longer be an issue but then they'll still struggle to avoid simple tactical ideas. But once you move comfortably beyond that phase, the game becomes much more about the things people want it to be about - strategy, plans, big picture stuff that's lots of fun. It's one of the way the game draws you in - it gets more and more addictive, and rewarding, the better you become at it!
The neat thing about Go is that, whilst the winning strategy is exactly to think ahead and enumerate all possible positions, to do so is impossible. (Even the superhuman AI fudge it. They can just read farther ahead than humans.)
So to do well you have to learn how to support your reading ahead with heuristics and a feel for the game.
A famous amateur player and advocate for the game once went through all the game records of Go Seigen in order to digitize them. This means having to pore over hand-written diagrams looking for the next number in the sequence of moves. Obviously this is easier if you can guess where to look. But, if you guess them all correctly, then you are playing just as well as the old master! After spending a good few months on the task, he was a significantly better player!
Nice. As systems become more and more complicated (like real world itself) it is no longer feasible to enumerate all permutations but rather get a feel for the patterns - an intuition. A skilled intuiter (?) would know the subtle ways in which patterns emerge.
I don't like chess, but like go. Go feels way more free form. In chess it feels like every move has been played already and has a name. I feel like I need to study up on all of it. In go there's so many possibilities, I just play something interesting and see where it takes me. Honestly just give it a go. :)
I like go and don't like chess, for the simple reason that getting good at chess requires a lot of memorization, while getting good at go doesn't. Having lots of openings and positions memorized to know the best moves automatically is not something that I personally find fun.
In go there are some sequences of "standard" moves (joseki) but it's highly controversial whether memorizing them even helps at all, see another thread in this same comments section.
Opening knowledge in chess is almost entirely unnecessary below a rather high level, perhaps 2200+.
The reason less experienced players get obsessed with openings is because they make regular tactical mistakes in the opening, and then blame lack of opening knowledge, as opposed to their lack of tactical ability. In other words they try to memorize their way out of tactical mistakes, which is impossible. At that point, after it inevitably fails to work, they claim they've plateaued, lack the IQ, maybe the memory, maybe are too old, or whatever other excuse.
This is made even worse by the fact that opening knowledge is ostensibly easy to improve whereas tactical vision seems very difficult to improve. In reality it's the exact opposite. Exact opening lines will fade from your mind rapidly (though general ideas will stay with you forever - but that's another topic), whereas grinding tactics might not 'feel' like you've learned anything, but overtime will permanently train your intuition to where it needs to be to start seeing major gains.
On top of all of this - one could simply play 'freestyle' chess (the starting pieces locations are randomized) and suddenly there is 0 opening theory. But you'll find that your freestyle rating is going to be strongly proportional to your 'normal' chess rating!
Chess has memorization; go has counting. Go endgames especially require a lot of counting. I don't think either skill is particularly fun.
I heavily dislike the auto-generated translations. They sound weird and make the website look cheap. I would rather you provided no translations and maybe let those less comfortable with English among us use their browser's auto-translate feature. Also, I'm sure there are several volunteers out there who would gladly translate this amazing resource for free.
This is nice, it's okay, but things like this have really decreased in quality and utility since Flash went away and the partial replacement of javascript took over. The old online-go "Learn Go" implemented in flash much, much better and more intuitive and interactive than this.
Hikaru no Go was my gateway drug into Go
and a great anime in its own right
I know that UI!
https://lichess.org/learn
Keeps you engaged.