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Learn to play Go

online-go.com

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Re: Learn to play Go

#71

Post by [deleted] »

hyperpape wrote: post #65
dragontamer wrote: post #7

Unfortunately, the early moves in the game ("Joseki") are the most important. They are also the most difficult to learn. It is essential to study these tactics in this website... if only because they are the only "ground truth" known about Go. But for rapid improvement, the only real way forward is to play lots and lots of games to learn how the early game flows. Direction of play, which side of the board is most imp…

> 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 professi…

[deleted]

Re: Learn to play Go

#72

Post by jibal »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #39
jibal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average FIDE elo is 1550; chess.com's average of 1200 elo is much lower because it has many beginner players, including children. The gap between those is huge--much larger than the numbers may suggest. At chess.com 1200 elo people still have terrible board vision and routinely drop pieces; by the time one reaches FIDE 1550 elo that is no longer true and people are starting to plot out complex tactics requiring a…

> 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, no…

> Why would that lower the average elo?

Because the average chess.com player is considerably weaker than the average FIDE player.

> 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.

Weak players come into the chess.com pool faster than they leave.

Re: Learn to play Go

#73

Post by swannodette »

SchwKatze wrote: post #69

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.

Blitz format is reasonably popular on KGS (once you get to a certain level) usually 10+0. Blitz is harder to find on Pandanet - but you can easily blitz on Fox.

Re: Learn to play Go

#74

Post by thrance »

I heavily dislike the auto-generated translations. They sound weird and make the website look cheap. I would rather you provided no translations and maybe let those less comfortable with English among us use their browser's auto-translate feature. Also, I'm sure there are several volunteers out there who would gladly translate this amazing resource for free.

Re: Learn to play Go

#76

Post by marcosscriven »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #40
marcosscriven wrote: post #30

Just idly clicking through until I got to “Ko”. I had no idea Go was stateful!

It's not supposed to be stateful. The ko rule is only there to block infinite loops.

What I mean is you can’t just look at a board and know the ko “state” - but yes I’m sure in practice it’s not that important.

Just my engineering brain picking up on it.

Re: Learn to play Go

#77

Post by [deleted] »

iberator wrote: post #54
bubblyworld wrote: post #17

I love Go and have played it a lot in person, but I always struggle to get games online, even on OGS. Feels like the online community is very small compared to chess (which is now my boardgame of choice, basically for this reason). Has this changed? Are there better sites now where a beginner can find matches without waiting half an hour or more?

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: Learn to play Go

#78

Post by bubblyworld »

lucketone wrote: post #41
bubblyworld wrote: post #17

I love Go and have played it a lot in person, but I always struggle to get games online, even on OGS. Feels like the online community is very small compared to chess (which is now my boardgame of choice, basically for this reason). Has this changed? Are there better sites now where a beginner can find matches without waiting half an hour or more?

Do your settings allow for handicapped games? This increases pool of potential opponents.

My personal preference is to play non-handicapped games, but that's a good point, thanks.

Re: Learn to play Go

#79

Post by somenameforme »

frenchtoast8 wrote: post #5

I recently learned Go for the first time and I have played almost 50 games of 9x9 on Online Go Server so far. I’m finding it a lot of fun but it has been very humbling. I learned chess in 7th or 8th grade and was easily able to get to about 700 Elo on chess.com after barely learning the rules, which is about the 60th percentile on the site. I only play a couple games a year now but can still hold my own against 1200…

The percentile stuff on chess.com has something funky going on with it. Lichess and Chess.com ratings are comparable (not the same, but at least ballpark comparable) and the median elo on lichess is about 1500. [1]

700 elo on chess.com is completely normal for a new player who knows the rules, but not much more. I have a good sized sample to back this up based on coaching classes of complete beginners and getting them to setup a class specific account.

Chess.com seems to have 1.3 million players with 100 ELO which is their hard cap minimum, so that is literally the same, if not worse, as a random move generator. So there has to be some weird bias there.

[1] - https://lichess.org/stat/rating/distribution/rapid

Re: Learn to play Go

#80

Post by somenameforme »

tomaskafka wrote: post #50

I apologize to hijack this a bit, but do you know of similarly accessible resources about chess? So far the stuff I found online is either nerdy or explaining the basic moves to the children.

If you mean for the stuff after you know the basic rules of the game, I'd highly recommend Daniel Naroditsky's 'speed runs.' [1] Basically he starts at an extremely low rating and works his way up in an intentionally instructive/systematic way, often playing the same openings and what not.

It's extremely instructive for players at all levels.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/@DanielNaroditskyGM/playlists

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