Learn to play Go

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).

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!

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. :)

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.

> 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.