Quote:
Originally Posted by Discipline
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.
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.
Quote:
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.
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.