Best Go Resources for a Beginner?

wrinkledshirt asks: "So, as an English teacher stranded in the middle of South Korea, I've learned that Go (or Baduk, as it's called here) is a really popular game with the locals. Unfortunately, it's really difficult to learn how to play it when most people who are good at it don't speak English very well. So, I've turned to the web. There are some okay teaching sites, but often the learning curve beyond simple rules explanation is pretty steep... 'This is a white stone. This is a black stone. They take turns. These are eyes. Ready? Okay, now observe how abandoning the joseki here leads to a gote which needlessly gives white sente...' (Me: 'WTF?!?'). What are the best Go resources for a beginner?" "I've been playing Go on yahoo, but the beginner rooms there don't have all that many beginners. Sensai's Library is pretty good, but laid out a little confusingly. The Go Teaching Ladder has a decent list of commented games, but it's hard to know which ones are instructive for beginners. I've also tried playing both GnuGo and Igowin (playing them against each other head to head seems to suggest that GnuGo has the better engine, although my version has a horrid scoring system), but in the end I'm worried that computers are the wrong way to learn this game. Books in English are hard to come by in my part of the country, but I'm considering ordering them or making the trip up to Seoul if there are titles worth buying."

Comments

Play it on the computer

[xanderwilson]

Wikipedia lists a whole bunch of software, including at least one free one online:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(board_game)

ALex.

tutorial site

[Flamerule]

I'll second (or third) the recommendation for the Interactive Way to Go. I looked at all the tutorial sites I could find back when I was first learning, and this one is the best. It's step-by-step, and doesn't go too fast, so it should definitely help you out.

Once you've done all the exercises there, phase 2 of your education should be the igowin demo, which uses a 9x9 board. You get to reinforce what you've learned by playing actual games on a small board. The game AI starts out at (what it considers) 20 or 30 kyu, I think, and then gets progressively more difficult. So you'll see how far down you can get... before too long, you should be able to beat the computer without too much trouble. Side note: it's a windows program, but it's a simple executable; I remember being able to run it fine in wine a couple years ago.

Good luck with the Go. And fyi, GoBase is a great site to check out once you know how to play.

Re:Play against people

[Doviende]

you can get to 25-20 kyu pretty quickly, but most good players seem to suggest that you don't study joseki until you're like 5 kyu.

in my experience you don't need to. studying joseki is robotic. for a long time, you need more general principles instead of closing your mind to new possibilities.

-doviende

Non-local instruction not much better.

[Telastyn]

While the actual explinations are better, most of the shape terminology is still foreign in the english go books I've seen.

Personally, I found that my experience playing American style turn/tile based wargames [such as the * General series of games by SSI, and pretty much anything published by Avalon Hill] helped a lot when learning go. Both styles of games involve 'lines' of units, and get the player to understand how different shaped lines are strong, how they are weak, and tactics to break the lines.

Why playing against a computer won't work

[thegrue76]

http://www.caldwell.jp/gobeyondchess.html

Snippet:

Computerizing go

The difficulty in computerizing the game becomes evident when you compare the way that go and chess are played. While chess has many standard openings that can be "fed" to a computer for analysis, a go player can pretty much do anything he or she wants. There is no "encyclopedia of openings" such as any self-respecting chess player would study (although there are some standard beginnings that players follow for common sense reasons). Nihon Ki-in's Saheki feels that there is a certain "feel" for the game, one that, at this point in technology, only a human can understand. A "feeling," he says, is similar to fuzzy logic. "Unless the technology of the computer can solve this fuzzy theory, a good player cannot be beaten by a computer."

There are just too many variables in the game of go for modern computers to deal with. A machine, according to Saheki, will have to duplicate human thought to accomplish with go what Deep Blue did with chess. Brute force calculation isn't enough. However, a few computerized go games do exist. How do the best of these compare to the top human players? When I asked Saheki this question, he picked up three magazines that were sitting on the coffee table between us. He put two of them next to each other. "This is a professional-level player," he said, pointing to the magazine on his left. "This is a top amateur-level player," he continued, pointing to the magazine on his right. "And the computer would be...." he proclaimed as he tossed the third magazine to his right halfway across the room, "there. Very, very, very weak." Point taken.