Go/Baduk/Weiqi
I started learning how to play Go a month or two ago, and I've been absolutely loving it! It's amazing to me how such a simple set of rules can give way to so much strategy and depth. Between the various ways to play online like OGS, GoQuest, and BadukPop I've had no trouble finding matches, but finding active discussion about the game online can be hard sometimes because of the relatively small playerbase (at least in the west).
Because of the reddit blackouts I've been avoiding spending much time on r/baduk (although it is still up), so I'm curious to see if there's many other players of the game on Tildes!
Some topics to hopefully spur a little more potential discussion:
What do you think would need to happen for Go to grow in popularity again? Chess has been seeing a huge resurgence in recent years, what would it take for Go to go through a similar renaissance?
If you've never tried Go, or you tried it and didn't want to continue, why not? For me, Go was something that had always kind of been on my periphery, but I never really realized how deep of a game it was until I took some time to learn how it worked. Are people intimidated by it? Just not aware that it exists?
If there's any longtime players of the game out there, what resources would you recommend to someone getting started, or at an intermediate level? I've been reading some of the books available in the SmartGo One app, as well as doing Tsumego, but I'm always on the search for more ways to learn and improve!
I got quite into Go for a year or two at some point - around the time when the Lee Sedol vs AlphaGo matches happened was probably the peak of my interest in the game. For some reason, as I got better, I suddenly started getting anxious about playing the game and it stopped being nearly as enjoyable as it had been before. It wasn't ladder anxiety as much as impostor syndrome - it felt like everyone at my level was better than me (I think I had an above average sense of what region to play in, but was worse than average at reading out fights - for my level that is, which was not very high, near the end of my "career" I played in an OTB tournament and got placed 12kyu EGF). In addition, I started university around that time, and found that after a day of doing math, playing abstract strategy games felt more like more work than relaxation. Then I got into MtG and my fate was sealed.
I would like to get back into it someday perhaps, and one thing I do enjoy is playing a game of Zen Go occasionally.
That's really interesting! I actually feel like I'm going through something a little similar right now.
I had a period of time after the game clicked with me that I was climbing ranks really quickly, and I felt very confident while playing, but now that I've reached the 15/14kyu range I've started to second-guess my knowledge a lot more. I'm guessing I'm just getting to the point where I'm playing against people that know how to punish the mistakes that I'm making, because I've been on a pretty intense losing streak. I'm a lot less sure about my moves (especially earlier in the game where it's much harder to guess the outcome of the move), even in situations where I'd previously been pretty confident in the right way to respond. One of my weakest areas is also reading ahead, although I'm pretty sure a lot of the time that issue is amplified by the fact that I'm getting myself into pretty tough situations to fight my way out of.
Luckily I'm not super competitive by nature, and I'm reassuring myself that the worst thing that could happen is I get demoted a few ranks and get put back into the range of players that I'm more comfortable playing against.
Out of curiosity, do you feel like your time spent playing Go affected your skill in other strategy-based games? I've always been awful at chess (despite my best efforts to improve), but I played a match the other day on a whim and I felt like I was already able to 'see' more of the strategy and read ahead a little further than I used to be able to.
Ha, no I don't think so at all. I'm just bad :P
Go is a great game!
Personally speaking, though, I really don't enjoy board games with random people, at least not without being able to talk to them and have a conversation at the same time. Which sucks because none of the people around me ever want to play.
@Deimos is also a fan of the game.
That makes total sense! Especially given that a 19x19 game of Go has the potential to run for a pretty long time depending on the time rules being used. I've found that as my ranking on online-go.com has gone up I've been running into more and more people that actually use the chat feature, but there was a pretty good stretch of ranks where basically no-one would speak at all.
That said, I've been pleasantly surprised at the fact that unlike pretty much any other online game with a chat feature, everyone I've talked to has been really nice!
Gonna echo ~Scot, live games are better. I've played three... Somewhat recently.
Played a lot online many years ago (not recently at all), and thought I was decent (I was not), but it really takes sitting across the table from someone willing to teach you IRL to get a better understanding. Otherwise online only becomes vaguely mechanical, almost like you are trying to turn yourself into an AI.
It's an awesome game, I like it way more than Chess, but it is also a huuuuuuuge time investment. Also in my experience the odds of meeting a random Go player IRL are pretty low (at least it rarely comes up in casual conversation, even in Asia).
Edit: to actually answer one of your questions, yeah IMO it is massively intimidating once you realize how many unknown unknowns there are as a beginner. You start off like "yeah, I get this"....then later on with a bit more experience it's more like "this is significantly more difficult and in depth than multivariate calculus, wtf have I gotten myself into?"
Long-time chess player (cat I), Go beginner. Slowly working my way through Cho Chikun's All About Life and Death, but it's a lot more demanding than I expected. Only played a couple of games online and 1-2 IRL.
I'd like it to become more popular, but it'd probably involve some celebrity reminding the 'wider masses' of the game, like chess got an upsurge last year.
Another thing is availability. Around here (central EU), you can find chessboards even in cafes and waiting rooms, but only know of two places in my city with a Go board.
I definitely agree on the aspect of availability!
I had to hunt all around my (US) city to find a board to play on, and basically just got lucky finding one in the back of a local board game shop gathering dust.
There's only one group that I know of that plays OTB and it's just 3-4 players that organize in a facebook group and meet at a chain sandwich shop. I was really surprised to find that none of my local game stores host any sort of Go events.
Go boards are pretty easy to find in the US these days. Most specialty board game stores will have a basic set, and the last time I set foot in a Barnes and Noble they had them too.
Then again, I'm also living in an area with a large Asian population, so I can see this not being the case everywhere.
That being said, good quality sets are still rare and expensive here. It's a good thing you don't need a fancy one to play. But I do wish that the sets they sold were larger; those flattened peas are difficult to position properly, let alone pick up.
I totally forgot about Barnes and Noble! I did actually find a set there, but it was much smaller than typical boards and the pieces were essentially just black and white mancala beads. I had a lot of trouble getting the stones off of the board when captured because of the size and the flat side, and none of them were particularly circular which made seeing groups on the board a lot more difficult for me.
I bought a plastic travel board off Amazon a while ago and now it's my main board. I rarely take out my nice one because it's so big.
My impression as a very bad amateur player in America is that it just doesn't have the cultural cachet. I tried to get a lot of my friends into it over the years, but nobody sticks to it. The biggest servers available in English are tiny compared to the ones available to Korean, Chinese, and Japanese nationals.
If someone did what Chess.com did to baduk/go, or if a few prominent streamers in the anglosphere picked it up, who knows? It's a wonderful game.
That's a good point, in the west pretty much everyone has the base knowledge of chess required to jump into a game with maybe some quick questions and clarification, but Go requires a full from-the-ground-up explanation to even attempt a match.
online-go.com has made finding matches pretty easy (although there are still times where I'll have to sit in matchmaking for a minute or two), but it's definitely still lacking in learning materials.
I have only played a little and have the most rudimentary understanding of the game. I would probably be too intimidated to try and play against someone.
I definitely felt that way when I first started playing too! I worried a lot that the person I was playing against would be annoyed at my complete lack of skill at the game, especially since it's a game where you essentially have to be able to decide whether you've won or lost in order to end the game, which can be really hard starting out! I'd worry that I had already totally lost and just couldn't tell, and that I was wasting my opponent's time.
What actually ended up getting me to play against more people online was the fact that I just couldn't seem to win at all even against the easiest of computer opponents, I figured the only way for me to improve would just be to jump in. I just played a bunch of 9x9 and 13x13 games since they're faster, I figured that way my opponent wouldn't be stuck playing with me for too long.
Luckily the Go community in general seems very patient, and are also desperate for more people to play and appreciate the game with! When I'm teaching someone how to play I find myself holding back for fear that they'll get frustrated and quit before they have a chance to understand what's so great about the game.
Playing a full game takes too long for me, so I haven't tried in many years. But I do Go problems on my phone occasionally. The "basic" problems in Tsumego Pro are a bit too challenging for an absolute beginner to learn the game, but they're fine for me.
It's hard to say whether I get any better at it. How I do mostly depends on my concentration.
Totally valid, even though 19x19 is definitely my favorite, I often find myself playing 13x13 or 9x9 matches because I'm worried I'll get interrupted halfway through.
Some Go servers do offer Blitz modes but the base level of skill required to have any success there has scared me away so far.
I play entirely "correspondence" games on https://online-go.com, where each player only has to make a move once every 24 hours or so. It takes months to finish a game, but it means I only play for a few minutes each day on any individual game, and I usually have around 5-10 games going at once.
Go works really well for playing this way, and that site also has multiple features that make it convenient. For example, you can set up moves in advance like "if the opponent plays X next, automatically play Y" for cases where the next few moves will be obvious.
I first got hooked in the late 90s when a thriving group was meeting at a local bookstore. They had a good range of skill from total beginner up to 4 Dan. I enjoyed the live games more than online. I studied a lot from books and got very good at bold moves and local fights towsrd the end game, but never quite mastered the grace and style of wide moves keeping the bigger picture during the earlier game. Nowadays I just play on an app, which has started to form bad playing habits, getting lazy letting the app visually score likely territory as its being played. I'd love to get back into live games but now i feel intimidated. I've been sitting at 11K on OGS for so many years I abandoned playing those games and feel I'd need to rethink my whole approach in order to continue to advance. I would love to see more pop culture mentions, shows and movies that feature it prominently like the movies Pi and Beautiful Mind that first got me curious about the game
I love Go, but I don't play it near as much as I used to. I got started way back in the late 2000s and would play on the KGS every night. I was not and am still not very good and the skill of the average online player is a little daunting at this point, but I do play the occasional OGS game now and then.
KGS was an amazing community. Remember TheCaptain? Those games were electric.
“Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go“ by Kageyama Toshiro is a superb book for an intermediary player. Kiseido seems to still be up and selling it. The good thing about the game today is how easy it is to play an adequate opponent. But you can easily miss the big picture that way.