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That said, GoGameGuru is just another sign of an explosion of amazing Go content, tools, and communities for an English speaking audience. There's really never been a better time to get into the game. You have Lee Hajin's (Korean 3p) YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTji1kQNoWIH85dB_Vxka9g where she plays games live on Tygem (one of the largest and strongest online Go communities, many top pros play there). You have online sophisticated pattern searching over hundreds of years of games http://ps.waltheri.net. You can get free online commentary on games you played https://gokibitz.com. And you can easily find an opponent online without leaving the comfort of your browser http://online-go.com.
I wrote a post in January summarizing all the great content now available as well as possible paths to deepening your understanding of the game - http://swannodette.github.io/baduk//baduk/2016/01/08/hello-b....
https://www.youtube.com/user/dwyrin
He's all about how you can reach dan level just by being good at direction of play, even if you're not great at solving problems. Also just the fact that he grew up in America makes him a little easier to understand.
Many people find the more relaxed environment useful for playing human games. You don't need to commit to a block of uninterrupted time, and you can take your time and play out ideas. There's a great Android client: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mco.prj.app.bw... and DGS plugin: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mco.prj.srv.bw...
The path I followed to get a decent understanding of the game (I'm about 13kyu now) was this:
1. Start by playing a few games, doesn't really matter the size of the board, or whatever, it's just for context and to get a general feel for the game. But not enough games to get dejected or fall into bad habits.
2. Read an introductory Go book. I personally first read "Go; More Than a Game" by Peter Shotwell. It explains the game from the very beginning and also has a lot of historical context which most Go books do not. My roommate had this book which was very convenient for me. An online resource that is fairly good is Sensei's Library, especially http://senseis.xmp.net/?HaengMaTutorialForBeginners. You can also find the definition and exampels of all Go terms here.
3. Play more games, try to apply things you learned from the book. Also start watching Nick Sibicky's YouTube lecture series. Just start at #1 and keep watching when you have time. I'm only on lecture ~30 but I find they have been very helpful.
4. Get a Tsumego (like chess problems, but Go problems) app or something for your phone and do a Go problem every so often. (Try to do at least 10 problems a day. Try reading it out rather than firing shots blindly. If you just brute force the solution you won't learn nearly as much as if you spend a long time just trying to read it out.)
5. At this point, you should be playing a few 19x19 games every week. Keep in mind that 9x9 is fairly different, so play it if you like it but keep in mind it is not 19x19 at all. Try to review after each game, or have your games reviewed by stronger players. There are a lot of friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable players in the chat rooms on online-go.com and the review tool is pretty cool. The site actually uses a pretty modern stack, too, using node.js and Angular, if I recall correctly... the devs hang out in chat too and are fairly open to questions)
6. At this stage, you should be somewhere around 20-15k on online-go.com. (Essentially, past the most basic novice level. You understand atari, ko, etc. You recognize some of the obvious mistakes.) Now it's time to buy a more serious Go book. I highly recommend "The Fundamentals of Go" by Toshiro Kageyama 7p and "Graded Go Problems for Beginners" (Volume 2) by Kano Yoshinori 9p. Kageyama's writing style is pretty entertaining and he stresses the fundamentals which are very important. The Go Problems book covers a lot more than life and death, it has opening, end game, etc problems, with explanations attached to all the answers.
7. Keep playing games, doing tsumego, watching youtube videos, and re-reading the books if relevant. It should be a straight and steady climb to single digit kyu-dom from here on out. At least that's my hope. :)
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NOTE: Do not play against Go computer programs if you can help it... they play bizarre moves that sometimes work out and sometimes are meaningless... You can learn much more from a human opponent who will help you learn the obvious mistakes by punishing you for them directly.
Large group death just basically mean a large group of stones, it could either be an invasion group, an attack and run group that grows, or even the used-to-be-territory-but-now-not group
Does this help your self diagnosis? If the computer ignored a capture it's because it didn't actually lead to a lot of territory gained, whereas whatever move it played probably did.
I think scoring and score estimating is one of the hardest things to understand (for full games I still often use a $5 android app where I just upload a picture of the board game, help it convert to an SGF, and then it auto-scores it, though sometimes it's faster to just count by hand), especially since there's multiple ways of doing it. With simple territory scoring when the game ends the dead stones that haven't actually been captured yet still get removed and added to the prisoners pile and the prisoners fill in your other territory so it might feel extra painful to lose stones... With area/stone scoring you still remove the dead stones but prisoners don't (directly) matter for the score, since you're just counting stones on the board plus uncontested area. But if a game was X moves with black having X/2 stones but white only having (X/2 - 10) stones on the board, clearly (assuming X is even and no passes, or if passes then giving up pass stones) 10 white stones were captured at some point, so there's already that relative difference in score before counting anything else. With some qualifications, the results (and the relative scores themselves) from each counting system will be the same. Thinking more about your relative score instead of giving each player actual numbers might help; I feel slightly better if I lost by 10 than if I had a negative score, say -5 to 5...
Somewhere I read about go it makes no sense to put stones on the area your opponent control because they will be captured. however
wwwww
w w
w b w
w w
wwwww
So, in this case, the black stone is auto-captured, and you get the territory within as well.
So, yes, playing white stones to capture is actually detrimental to yourself. But also imagine if black keeps playing. They would be giving away free captures since black can never create eyes. And once the space is almost filled white can play 1 stone to capture all of the black stones.
Edit: Another way to imagine it is if neither player could pass. While yes White would lose territory as it played stones, it would be compensated by Black playing stones that will be captured in the end. Thus it becomes a wash, and thus why dead groups are auto-captured.
In Japanese rules you lose points for playing in your own territory. The black stone in your example is dead, and a reasonable player would allow it to be removed, but there's nothing stopping them from claiming it to be alive and forcing white to play to capture it. At this point the only option is for white to dispute its life status, and to duplicate the game board and make a hypothetical sequence of plays to prove it to be dead without actually playing the moves. There's a lot of added complexity for no real benefit, because the end result is usually identical.
The next AI challenge is to have the AI make an argument that will convince everyone to adopt the One True Most Elegant Ruleset for Go. (http://warp.povusers.org/go/RulesElegance/ is an interesting page, along with his proposal: http://warp.povusers.org/go/MyRulesProposal/)
The AGA system of pass stones, bringing area and territory scoring into alignment, is very nice, but I think it's still a bit abstract for someone who's just starting out.
If a human tries to argue that b is alive, then either (a) that human is a novice, you can teach them, or (b) that human is a poor sport, and you shouldn't play with them.
Japanese counting is like Chinese counting, but assumes your opponent is not a jerk without explicitly handling cases when that's not true.
There's a common advice to lose your first 50 games as quickly as possible (http://senseis.xmp.net/?LoseYourFirst50GamesAsQuicklyAsPossi...). This will give you some basic intuition about the game. After a couple more hundred games, go becomes very beautiful.
The beauty of the game is appealing however so I want to get better at it. I'll working on losing more then :)
(1) Identify all the groups.
Most important are any groups larger than about 4-6 stones or groups that cannot be sacrificed for some other reason. You'll often see some straggler group which exists purely to disconnect your opponents groups keeping them weak. That one is small but important!
(2) Determine their status.
Essentially, their opponent decided it was time to kill this group and tried with all their might would the group be able to survive? You can be fuzzy about this ("there are a lot of possibilities for this group to live") or even economical ("it would take a lot of turns for B to kill W's group here, is it worth it?").
(3) Decide who "owns" every empty intersection.
Once you've identified the strong, living groups you'll see that they probably capture territory because they surround some empty intersections. These spaces can be invaded or reduced if they are too large (so that the opponent could possible attack inside and make a living group) or if they have open spaces (where an opponent could threaten to stream inside). There will also be a lot of points in the early and middle game for which nobody really owns and you can evaluate if one player merely holds greater or lesser sway over those intersections.
(4) Subtract maybe 20 points for each weak group that can't be sacrificed.
Saving groups that must be saved is an expensive operation and your opponent will probably cash in on you doing so.
(5) If it's early or mid-game consider each player's global influence.
For instance, a common trade is that one player will make a living group in the corner and take points while the other player will surround that group on the "outside" producing a large wall facing the center. This wall cannot claim to make territory since it doesn't completely control any location, but it certainly makes battles nearby tilt in the favor of the wall owner. This will translate to cash elsewhere for that player.
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Don't try too hard at any step. Part of skilled judgement is being able to do each step accurately (and include more important factors) much in the same way that materiel balance in Chess can be hard to judge unless you know how to contextualize it.
Also note that a well-matched professional game will be decided by just 1 or 2 points. Until your judgement is very tight or the game is very near the end it can be hard to be precise enough to see that.
When I used the ladder, 15 years ago, their problem was that they had too many reviewers and too few students, so it was nice as a student :) You should give it a try.
When you've played a few proper games, I recommend joining a teaching ladder. Your games will be reviewed by stronger players. In exchange, you are expected to review the games of weaker players. Teaching can be just as valuable as learning, as it forces you to clarify concepts in your mind in order to explain them. Even if you're a high-kyu player, you can teach a beginner the basics.
https://gtl.xmp.net/ http://senseis.xmp.net/?KGSTeachingLadder
The person at the top of the ladder is essentially performing a public service, because they don't get the benefit of learning from a more experienced player. If they leave then the ladder doesn't collapse, the second strongest player simply becomes the leader.
Ladders are commonly used as a competition format in many sports. They provide an excellent way of giving players a challenging but enjoyable game. Teaching ladders are simply an elaboration on this format.
What I really want is a kibitzing clock when playing other people: http://www.emptytriangle.com/archive/show/8
I think the biggest insight I had about Go when I was learning to play it is that the game commences on the entire board at once. At the beginning I was over-concentrating on a single "active" region. In reality, abandoning some "battle" and adding stones to an "unrelated" region is a perfectly sensible strategy as long as you think it will give you territory in the long run.
A good rule of thumb = don't needlessly increase the margin of your victory for any particular part of the board
Sometimes a group of stones is in a position such that no matter how their owner plays there is no way they can be saved (assuming correct play from the opponent). The stones are called "dead". Instead of capturing those stones, it's better to play elsewhere and retain the initiative ("sente"). You retain control of the game and your opponent is forced to react. You're not losing anything, because you can come back and capture the stones any time. If your opponent tries to save them you know a move that will prevent it.
Recognizing stones that can't possibly escape being captured, and knowing how to stop them escaping, is the study of "life and death". The better you get at this the less likely you are to waste moves or give away the initiative.
I know playing against humans is better, but a computer opponent has the patience to watch me try hundreds of moves that they know are dumb, or let me cheat to test "what if" scenarios.
A variation explorer with a "What would GNU Go do?" button feels like it would be good for this.
One thing that has helped me is Tsumego problems, which cover local life-and-death situations. They usually include responses by the opponent to help you see why a move is bad.
I can sit down and maybe solve a tsumego problem, OK. Sometimes I guess a bit (MCTS!) instead of working out the whole tree, developing that intuition.
But tsumego are labelled with difficulty and that they are winnable.
But when I play a game, how do I know how if a certain local position is winnable, and worth spending the minute(s) to find how to win it?
For the former, you need to read out ALL variations, and not just one branch. For the latter, and your question, it's just simply a matter of solving lots and lots of tsumegos. In real game, people missed life and deaths situation all the time :-).
> While exploring his grandfather's shed, Hikaru stumbles across a Go board haunted by the spirit of Fujiwara-no-Sai, a Go player from the Heian era. Sai wishes to play Go again, having not been able to since the late Edo period, when his ghost appeared to Honinbo Shusaku, a top Go player of that period. Sai's greatest desire is to attain the Kami no Itte (神の一手?, "Divine Move") – a perfect move. Because Hikaru is apparently the only person who can perceive him, Sai inhabits a part of Hikaru's mind as a separate personality, coexisting, although not always comfortably, with the young boy.
> Urged by Sai, Hikaru begins playing Go despite an initial lack of interest in the game. He begins by simply executing the moves Sai dictates to him, but Sai tells him to try to understand each move.
It's a fun series, especially if you have a fast-forward button and don't have to fumble around with discs
I would add a recommendation to watch the Japanese dub. I accidentally stumbled upon the English dub on Youtube recently, I didn't even know there was one, it was terrible...
5 minute long freeze-frame shots where the camera slowly pans over shocked faces having a massive emotional reaction to every single clever move.
Just like I'd fast forward Dragon Ball Z every time Goku needs to use 3 episodes of grunting to charge up an energy ball attack.
The adaptations usually insert so much unnecessary filler because they'd otherwise catch up to the latest manga chapter much more quickly. Your typical half-hour episode usually covers 2-3 chapters' worth of material. Without the filler, a year's worth of manga might be covered in half a season of anime.
Regarding HnG specifically, reading the manga has the additional advantages of not bothering with intros/outros/spoilery-previews and allowing you to avoid messing with pause buttons to get a better view of game boards. The art is also absolutely gorgeous, especially in the latter half of the series.
Another useful site which has interactive tutorials : https://online-go.com/learn-to-play-go
https://online-go.com is also good for playing games online.
- I personally like this guide: http://playgo.to/iwtg/en/
- If you use Windows or Mac, there's a very good software called SmartGo. On Linux you might want to try "Kigo", from KDE.
- Eidogo.com and Josekipedia.com are good for learning joseki.
- For Android there's a really good app for exercises called "Magic Baduk Go".
Some mini review of different servers:
- online-go.com (OGS) is excellent, but is very new and not as active as other servers. Still recommended.
- KGS if you are western is the thing. There are usually bots that are 24 kyu that you can play against if you are new to the game.
- IGS might be good as well.
- Tygem and WBaduk are very hostile to new players because of the high number of sandbaggers (dans that pretend to be 18 kyu). You can get it running on Windows or Wine.
Books:
- "In the beginning", "38 basic joseki" and "attack and defense" are probably the best books for starting on go. SmartGo has them, and this will save you the effort of reading complex diagrams. Instead you can have interactive embedded go boards.
Equipment and playing offline:
- If you don't want to commit to buy equipment, drop by a go club and try the game. Usually people there are very friendly to newcomers.
- If you just want to commit to the real thing you can look for go boards and stones on Amazon. My personal favourite stones are the "Yangstone go stones", korean made durable glass stones. Other stones like Yunzi can be really fragile and shatter. Stones are the most important thing to start.
- You can start off a printable 9x9 board for practicing, then play on 13x13 then 19x19. Starting directly on 19x19 is a bit difficult.
Watching professional go games:
- You can subscribe to Baduk TV, or watch their Youtube channel for free: https://www.youtube.com/user/onbaduktv
- You can see latest game records (kifu) uploaded to gokifu.com
Lessons:
- Some people on KGS offer lessons. While this can be a bit expensive and they might be hard to find, it's a possibility. I did this for a couple of years and I went from 20 kyu to around 5 kyu.
There are a few medium quality boards on there. There is a $70 set with free shipping that includes:
• 1 full size (17"x18") wooden board with wooden feet
• 320 Bi-convex glass stones with plastic containers
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.co.aifactor...
The big lacking feature of the app for me is that it doesn't let you save your game as an SGF. At least https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mco.prj.app.bw... lets you do that.
It's free and utilizes a version of GNU Go to play as computer AI. Also supports local multiplayer. Doesn't support network. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.agrothe.go&...
For general use as well as GNU Go and DGS: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mco.prj.app.bw...
For Go problems, Tsumego Pro: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.lrstudios....
https://www.youtube.com/user/gocommentary/videos
This is one of the best game commentaries in my opinion. It has subtitles to help with the accent.
It's sure makes me feel better about all the time I've spent playing Go during the workday these past few weeks, anyway.
Surprisingly, south Limburg doesn't seem to be included.
https://www.gobond.nl/verenigingen http://www.eurogofed.org/members/
https://shop.gogameguru.com/newbie-go-game-set/
I have one of these folding magnetic sets. It's a few centimetres smaller than a standard board, but is perfectly usable and very convenient for study or casual games in cafes. It costs €22 shipped, but you'll have to wait a few weeks as it's sent direct from China.
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Free-shipping-large-magnetic-...