Sergey Bring, Bill Gates, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein and other famous people love this game. I’ll tell you why it is so cool, how to learn to play and what this game gave me.
I so often mention this game among my acquaintances and automatically draw parallels that I decided to tell about it in detail. Despite the fact that I do not devote much time to it, it has long become a part of my thinking. If I lived for 300 years and did not have to worry about money, I would gladly devote myself to playing Go in some Buddhist temple, meditating, exercising and enjoying nature. But alas, this is impossible, so the game is just one of the many hobbies, which I will discuss below.
Content
What is Go and how to play it
How and why I chose the Go game
What does the game develop and what advantages does the player get?
How to progress and become a strong player
Where to play and which server to choose
Links to useful and additional materials
What have I done to develop the game
conclusions
What is Go and how to play it
You can find out more about the game in abstruse language on Wikipedia. If you want something simpler and humorous, then it’s better to go to Lurk.
Go is a fully informed strategy board game. Complete information is when victory or defeat is 100% dependent on your skills, and not on chance. There are many legends, but no one knows where and when it originated. According to various estimates, it is from 2 to 5 thousand years old. By the way, the rules of the game have hardly changed since those times.
In Korea she is called Paduka, in China – Weidie, and in Japan – Igor. We have stuck with the abbreviated name – Go. All the strongest players from Asian countries, which are in constant competition with each other. The rest of the world cannot yet show the same level as the Asian countries, since the attitude to the game is completely different. If there is full-fledged financial and not only support from professional players, then this does not exist in our country.
An excellent video about the game in general, except for the ad for the World Cup at the very end.
The rules of the game are simple. Two players play, one with black stones, the other with white stones. The goal is to enclose a larger area on the board with stones of your own color than the enemy.
Below is the game of two Japanese professionals on a 9×9 board. See how the potential territory changes according to the player’s color. What happens when an opponent invades what seems to be your territory, how is the carve-up. The game is beautiful, as if you were looking at the confrontation between Yin and Yang.
Game Iyana Yuta (white) vs Morikawa Daisuke (black). Black – 17 points, white – 19.5. White won by 2.5 points.
The textual description of the rules is rather boring and incomprehensible for beginners. Therefore, it is better to see once than to read the text.
One of the best videos that clearly explains all the rules of the game in Go. Just remember that White has a compensation for Black always playing first – 6.5 points. They forgot to mention this in the video.
If you want to understand not only the rules, but also a few consequences from them, then an interactive quest will help. Or buy one of these books, they are all good:
Alexey Kozhunkov. Textbook book “Learn to play Go!”;
Alexander Dinnerstein. “The Young Emperor Learns to Play Go”;
Igor Gratin, Mikhail Emiliano. Thinking and Winning: A Go Game for Beginners.
How and why I chose the Go game
Back in 2013-2014, I studied the human brain, taking academic courses, reading popular science books, listening to lectures on YouTube, etc. As a result, I came to the logical conclusion that if the brain is not used, it will atrophy. That is, if there is no blood flow to certain areas for a long time, then they literally die off.
