Forget Chess. There have to be some other go players around here?

I'm nothing special at it. I'm an 11k* on IGS, but I haven't played much in the last couple years, just every few months or so. I haven't *studied* in about a couple years either.

Of course the neat thing about Go is that being nothing special still puts you way ahead of most of the English speaking world. :-)

Is probably just as accurate.

Just about!

But I can recommend good books to anyone who wants to get past that.

Graded Go Problems for Beginners by Kano Yoshinori. There's an English translation put out by Kiseido. 4 volumes, but a true beginner only needs volumes 1 and 2. You only need 3 and then 4 later, as they rapidly get more dense and with more complicated problems.

The one area they're weak at is in the opening, and as a result that's also my weakest area as I haven't picked up any other books yet, heh.

I don't get time to play much, but I love the game. It has a deceptive simplicity; the rules are so easy to learn yet there are so many subtleties and intricacies to master.

For books, I think the Elementary Go Series is excellent.

Bump because there's no way Monopoly deserves to have more posts than Go.

Anyone else play on IGS? I've only played a few games there (I played on-and-off elsewhere in the past, and quite a few times recently against GNU Go. I'm currently a provisional 15k.) I'm DaMaGor there as well.

I've never played.

Always wanted to give it a try, though.

I've always played on KGS; has anyone played on both, and is IGS the better of the two?

Is go at all similar to othello? I obv don't know the rules, but they look similar!

No, not much IMO. It's similar in that you are placing pieces on an open grid, and you are trying to "capture territory", but it is done in different ways in each game. Go is much, much more complex than Othello, and is also considered by most to be far more complex than Chess.

You really should; it's a great game.

I used to play on KGS but moved to IGS. KGS has I think better rule sets available, but I find the culture to be clique-y and annoying. Plus I've been outright berated on there for putting up a game request using chinese rules. I found it technically superior but culturally inferior.

So, I ended up on IGS. The software's not as good but at least I don't have people aggravating me when I'm just trying to have fun. Anyway, I find the competition stronger even across comparable rating levels. I hear that effect's even stronger on the popular Korean servers, but I've never played on them.

The first thing that struck me about IGS is the players are much better at the fundamentals of life and death than at KGS. I found that I had big holes in my game from playing at KGS that IGS forced me to patch up quickly.

IGS has been adding features to make getting a match easier anyway, so getting a game on either shouldn't be a problem.

Just know that the majority there is not speaking English, so when they say よろしくお願いします they're being polite.

I love go, but I suck at it. (Im like around 14-16k I think, played mostly 9*9 and 13*13 against The many faces of go and I am like slightly better than it when I am concentrated)

If anyone wanna crush my soul on IGS drop me a PM. Also if there is a dan-level player struggling with poker I could give poker coaching for some go training :P

Or we could do a 2p2 go club with a weekly go tournament or something?

I'd be interested in some sort of handicap tournament. I mean sure we could play straight up, but I have a feeling we have enough diversity in experience levels that it would be overwhelming for some.

Especially if we get some new blood into the game as a result of this forum, handicaps would help.

every year I say I'll get back into go.

I used to be about 10k European, I got there very quickly from beginner and then kind of plateaued, then discovered poker and gg go.

I found it much harder than chess to play online -- possibly because I had been used to chess diagrams but was a relative noob in go, possibly just because I needed a longer attention span. I'd like to give it another shot though, and I'd definitely be interested in a hand

Is playing the avalanche joseki +EV?

Does anyone know if there's a site that allows long time limits - sort of like "Postal Go" (if there ever was such a thing - I know Chess has been played that way). I have a friend I like to play with, but we don't usually have hours to block out at the same time, so I'd like to play games where we even have a day or two to make a move if need be, maybe have a few games going at once. I assume this wouldn't be used widely due to the obvious potential for abuse (using computers, etc), but playing with a friend I'm not worried about this. We have played via email using a Go font to type out a board, but it's much nicer having it on a server.

Dragon Go Server I think is what you want.

I played on it a few times to try to break my habit of playing rashly and not thinking enough. It didn't really work as that goes. I think I got better playing though.

Good question. The pros don't seem to avoid it. But then again they've memorized a lot of its variations.

I'm pretty lost when it comes to opening play though.

Fantastic, that's exactly what I'm after! Thank you, thank you!!

Once I get back into the swing of things and get some work caught up in a couple of weeks I'd be into some games on there if anyone's up for it; hopefully some of us can trust each other to play fairly that way.

But I'd be into some matches on IGS and/or KGS at some point as well.

I recommend using "Fischer" time on DGS so that abandoned games expire more quickly. DGS is pretty cool. I like a time setting of 15 days +1 day per move. DGS uses a variant of Fischer timing in which <initial_time> (e.g. 15 days) is an upper limit on your time bank.

OK we've almost caught up with Monopoly, so...

I'm Neil on IGS and NeilStevens on DGS.

Definitely open to some games sometime.

Thinking about this some more: I think they probably consider the avalanche to be low variance.

I tried to start playing Go, but the client that I tried to use to connect to the major Go server was so non-user-friendly that I blew it off.

I also sort of get the impression that Go is a game that you can't really learn, you just play and play and play and play and you start getting better, almost like you're training your brain like it's a neural net.

There's a park like 5 minutes away where hundreds of old guys gather every night and play intense Go (Wei Qi in Mandarin). I'd like to own them. Suggested methods for doing so within ... 2-3 months of studying/playing 2 hrs a day?

I'm 1800 ELO in chess if that would help.

The IGS software is a pain, undoubtedly. Apparently Pandanet has something better for the users in Japan, but that doesn't help most, heh.

For getting started you might try KGS. Then if you find the game is worth getting into you can later move on.

Sort of. One important thing to learn is what kinds of shapes are good or bad, which will live or die, or probably live or die. It's a very fluid game, and gets to be more so the higher up you go. The best players give themselves the most possibilities. What kinds of possibilities work or not involve a fair amount of intuition, that mostly comes from working out the same kinds of positions and their possibilities over and over and over again, I suppose.

Of course then there are tactical fights which spring up in a specific area, but even then the broader full-board intuition is important when you start having to make threats over a critical point.

I think this is probably what would give the most difficulty to chess players new to the game of Go.

Chess is much more rigid. There is a fixed goal, and you know when you've achieved it. Each piece can only make so many moves, and all of your moves are aimed toward a single goal.

Go has a lot more possibilities. Since you're just trying to gain the most territory rather than capture a single piece, it's not always easy to tell if you've done it or not. The decisions can be overwhelming; in the beginning and middle of the game there are literally tens of places you'd like to place a stone on at any given time. You have to decide which one gives you the most territory in the end. And of course this can't be easily calculated, because at first you are only building a framework. You don't want to overreach or your opponent will take advantage of your weakness, and you don't want to be conservative, or you give up too much territory. Finding the right balance is, as Neil says, largely guided by experience and intuition.