Go is a 2,500 year old two-player board game where players take turns placing stones, working to capture territory on a grid. The basics of Go are relatively simple, and with a friend who knows the game guiding you, you can see improvement in your play within an hour or two of starting.
Photo of two people playing Go by Brian Jeffery Beggerly
I started playing Go in mid-2020 as a way to spend time with my friends online. A good friend introduced me and several others to OGS, one of the main western servers for playing Go online. I was surprised to find that once I knew the basics of the game, I could very quickly look at more advanced players’ games (even professional matches) and have an understanding of what was happening and who was ahead. Unlike Chess, where you need to know a huge number of set-ups and variations, Go is visually straight-forward and easy to follow. All the information you need to understand the board is right there in front of you.
I started watching Go matches on YouTube, doing tsumego (life and death) puzzles, and bought books so I could study and become a better player. Go became a direction to point myself during a pandemic that had robbed me of my focus. While I had trouble creating music or art, I could look at these little black and white stones and learn their patterns and strategies. I felt it change not just how I played Go but how I approached other things as well; the study had affected and sharpened my problem solving outside of the game. Slowly, I began moving up in rank on OGS.
A beginner starts at a rank of around 30-kyu and moves to lower numbers as they get better. Kyu can be thought of as a “student” rank. Within the kyu rankings, you can generally think of double-digit kyu players (often abbreviated as DDK) as casual or beginner players, and single-digit kyu players (abbreviated as SDK) as more intermediate players. Once you pass 1-kyu, your next rank would be 1-dan, with dan being a sort of “master” rank. At this point, you can rank up to 7-dan, the highest amateur rank.
Right now I’m sitting around 15-kyu. I’ve been playing enough to not be quite a beginner but also not quite intermediate. As one of the few things I’ve been able to focus on in the past several months, I’ve spent a lot of time watching games live on OGS. As a semi-casual player, it’s fascinating to watch different ranks of play in Go. At low ranks, like 25-20 kyu, I am amazed to see mistakes that, while obvious to me now, I was making constantly not very long ago. Then, when watching SDK ranks, I’ll think I’ve read out a solution to an area of play, only to see moves I never would have considered completely blow my reads out of the water (looking ahead in a series of moves is referred to as “reading” in Go).
Go also lends itself to developing a personal style. Masaki Takemiya, a 9-dan player, who uses an instinctual “cosmic style,” says that Go is more like a dance than a fight, and notes that learning to dance made him a better player. Cho Chikun, also 9-dan, is extremely thoughtful about how he reads out moves, and is a master at fighting for the life of groups. Then you have many players who study the latest AI inspired plays, plays with potential for high points but may seem unintuitive to human players who can’t read out hundreds of possible board states in a split second. This room for creativity and expression is another reason Go is both fun to play and interesting to watch.
While the increase in focus has been nice, the most important aspect of Go has been the time that it’s given me with friends. We’ll periodically call an impromptu Go club, where we take turns playing each other, with various handicaps to account for differences in rank (stones pre-placed on the board), and review the games we’ve played to help each other better understand the game. Now that my friends and I have started to get vaccinated, one of the first things we plan to do as a small group is play Go on real boards, in person (probably in a park because, let’s be honest, we’re all going to be dealing with a lingering anxiety about enclosed spaces for a long time). This deceptively simple game has had what I believe will be a long lasting impact on me and my relationships, making those friendships stronger, and creating a noticeable difference in how I think about problem solving, pushing for more patience and strategy.
During the pandemic, we’ve all had to find ways to be with the people we are forced apart from. For you, maybe it’s been a book club, a remote movie night, or video games. I’m deeply grateful for my time with Go and with the people it’s brought me closer to. I look forward to seeing where it takes me as I start playing in person. I hope you’ll try the game yourself and find it as capturing as I have.