Learn to play Go

> Unfortunately, the early moves in the game ("Joseki") are the most important. They are also the most difficult to learn.

Nah, they aren't the most important (you can do without), not are the usual ones particularly difficult to learn.

Source: I'm a European 4 Dan.

(To expand on this: if you're a beginner, joseki don't matter. When you become a strong player (several of my friends are professional players), joseki is something you can usually come up with, or you come up with a similarly good non-joseki move, which is also ok. Practically, the game is usually decided in middle game fighting.)

Go is a wonderful game. My older brother bought a Go set when I was a little kid and we played together. Now, 65 years later I need to give him a 9 stone handicap (I cheated by taking lessons from a South Korean Go Master and studying several books), but thanks to the wonderful handicap system, games can still be fun even when players have very different skill levels.

I randomly tried a few exercises on the linked web site - nicely done!

Off topic, but I wrote a commercial Go playing program in the late 1970s. This was a great hobby.

> To put it in perhaps more concrete terms: playing a "tactic" position may net you +10 points across a sequence of 5 moves or so. (IE: One well placed tactical move, and ~4 followup moves may capture 5 enemy stones + 5 territory simultaneously from your opponent). However, every single early-game move is worth nearly +20 points of territory if played correctly. I'm serious.

I'm baffled by this comment. Both professional commentary and AI evaluation confirm that most joseki mistakes are very small, often on the order of 1-2 points, because the temperature is low. There are specific joseki that turn into fights (e.g. Taisha), and it is possible to lose 10-20 points in those, but first of all, it's typically possible to play conservatively and avoid those joseki, second, most errors in them are smaller, and third, mid-game fights end up being even bigger (an error in a capturing race can be an almost unlimited number of points, having 40 points at stake is common).

I'm curious what level you are? As a 4kyu (European), I can confidently say joseki is less important than reading up to my level. I believe stronger players say the same well into the amateur dan level.

I suspect that each player has a bowl of stones, and they have 1 lid that covers those bowls. After taking a turn, the player puts the lid over their own bowl so that the other player can easily see that its their turn.

"Drive by" game, to me, sounds like they've got the board set up somewhere in the house, and make moves over the course of a day (days?), rather than sitting across from each other and having dedicated time for the game.

One thing that stood out when I tried to learn and play Go was the tempo.

I'm a chess guy, and I like to play blitz with 5+0 and bullet (format equivalent to tik tok) so games tend to be frenetic, but it's quite rare to find a Go game on those formats, they tend to have 40+ min in time. And honestly, this is a big W for Go.