Yukigami here~
So reader, do you know what the game called "Go" is?
You can also read about it here at Sensei's Library.
Go is an immensely fascinating, deep, competitive, and mentally cultivating board game that originated in China some ~4,000 years ago. The game embodies the people playing - particularly higher level players who've mastered the basics and become able to play well - and the players' emotions, personalities, and in-game ambitions are manifested - and visible
to
some - in each of their moves. Although man-made, many have considered Go to be ominously deep,
simply flawless, and analogous to life despite having very few rules and being played on nothing but a 19 x 19 grid, by taking turns placing black or white stones
on the intersections rather than in between them (so, not on the squares.)
Many players such as myself actually got into Go as a result of having watched the Anime
Hikaru no Go!
The game is about
surrounding territory (area of the board), and the two players take turns placing one stone at a time on intersections of the board. Go can be played online, too, on servers such as
KGS or
Tygem. Each intersection of the board is worth one point, and the player with the most points(territory) by the end wins (unless they win by resignation, of course).
Counting takes place after both players have passed their turns due to inability to find any remaining moves on the board worth any points for them (I will make a video of it sometime). Stones themselves on the board are not worth points, unless they've been captured or the players are using the
Chinese counting style (we'll talk about that much later on another occasion).
Each single stone placed on an intersection without any other stones next to it to the
north, east, south, or west of it has four
"liberties"; the empty intersections north, east, south and west of it,
not including diagonal directions, are its "life" - in Mandarin Chinese we would call this "chi". What happens when the last liberty is gone is that the group is immediately taken off the board and added to the
prisoners/captures (however you wish to call them) of the unfriendly(capturer's) colour. Captured stones are stored in the lid of an open Go stone bowl/container, or otherwise off the board and away from the bowls of stones, and kept for later.
Every stone on the board is referred to in terms of
"groups"; any one or more stones of the same colour are considered all one "group" as long as they are all
connected by their liberties - that means that a string or cluster of stones diagonally next to it counts as a separate group. I won't explain the
Chinese counting style now since it's complicated to explain and very unnecessary, but
the usual style of counting -
the Japanese style - is done by having both players pass their turns and agree to score the game, remove all stones recognized on the board as "dead" that were not removed as captures during the game due to having died
without ever running out of liberties (there are fundamental rules and concepts for recognizing dead groups).
In other words, stones that end up in a hopeless situation and cannot escape the fate of a death-by-liberty-shortage that the opposing player
could manually initiate at any time during the game are, as a rule, considered "dead already", and the player whose territories contain the opposite-coloured dead stones is
not required to spend moves to shorten the liberties of the stranded stones until the liberties reach zero. It is a common mistake by weak players to go out of their way to capture all the already-dead groups of the opposing colour needlessly, even though the process of placing stones inside their own territory fills up their own surrounded intersections, thereby losing them one point per move.
After removing all of the dead stones from the board and adding them to the opposing player's captures,
neutral spots, or
dame ("dah-may" - intersections that lye in between opposite-coloured territories that are impossible to fully encircle and thereby claim as points, due to lack of room) are played either optionally, or to prevent confusion, or to claim more real points if for some reason the players are counting with the reversed-logic Chinese method (which in such case, should definitely all by played on *before* passing the turn). In the west we generally refer to them as "dame" or "neutral points". I would greatly suggest beginners to fill in all the neutral points before scoring in order to make the respective territories very clear.
After pulling captured stones off the board, each player takes all the stones they've captured and places them onto intersections inside any of the territories of corresponding colour. By this logic, the more of a player's stones have been captured, the more points they will lose out on later. One capture becomes equivalent to one surrounded intersection of territory. The difference is that surrounding an intersection gains you one point, whereas capturing a stone causes your opponent to lose one point during scoring. Thus, the two are equivalent.
However, it is usually much, much easier to surround area on the board than to capture many stones; although weak players constantly have their stones captured by others, such is usually not the case in high-level games. Most of the small amount of stone capturing that goes on in high level games is a side effect of or effective sacrifice for the purpose of surrounding territory, invading territory, fighting to make a group fully alive etc.
If, for example, the Black player still has White captures left to fill up White territory with even though he has already reduced all of White's territory to zero with White captured stones, the way to deal with this situation is through the basic logic of points in the game: since gaining a point for oneself or taking away a point from the opponent is equivalent towards winning the game, since winning requires just 0.5 points more than the opponent as its minimum requirement, the player who is unable to use the rest of his captured stones counts them up; if there are still ten more White captures yet unplaced, for example, then Black can instead increase his own territory by ten points, by removing ten of his own Black stones from his territories, thus increasing his total territory by ten while not putting the opponent into negative numbers of territory. Also, players cannot run out of stones; usually a Go set has something like 200+ stones per side, and it's extremely unlikely and pretty near impossible that more would be needed.
Because Black has the significant advantage of playing first (though this is generally only significant for advanced players, so don't even bother blaming a loss on that!), White receives a bonus of 6.5 points called
"Komi" (from Japanese) which is added to his or her total score at the end of scoring. Komi is where the ".5" comes from in the score of Go games, a fractional difference received by white in order to prevent tied games. Thus, if Black has 76 points on the board and white has 70 on the board, then if it's an even game (no handicap), White wins because 70 + Komi (6.5) = 76.5, thus White has 0.5 points more than Black.
A Komi of 0.5, which merely causes White to win in case of a draw, is referred to as a
1-stone handicap. In other words, reducing White's Komi to a mere tie-breaker is a measure taken to compensate for a 1-rank difference (
"a stone's difference"). Below, I will briefly detail the rating system. For player-player rank differences of more than one, stones are set onto the "star points" of the board (starting with corners, following a certain arrangement for each configuration). Even though black starts off with extra stones on the board, White's Komi is also reduced to 0.5 in all these arrangements.
A handicap of two entails placing a black stone on two corner star points lying diagonally across from each other on he board. Specifically, Black traditionally places them in the corners in the upper right and lower left from his or her point of view.
A 3-stone handicap has a stone on each corner star point except for the one in the upper left, which is used for the
4th handicap stone.
In a 5-stone game, there is a stone placed on the star point in the very center of the board in addition to the four corners.
For 6-stone handicaps, however, the handicap stones are arranged in favour of symmetry by placing a stone in each corner, and a stone on each of the east- and west-side side star points.
7-stone games, like all of the other configurations, maintain symmetry (except for one- and three-stone handicap setups, that is). Compared to a 6-stone game, a 7-stone game also has a stone placed in the center (the star point in the center is called "Tengen").
8-stone games have a handicap stone on all star points other than the central one, and 9-stones games have handicap stones on every single star point.
While Go in terms of rules and objective is very simple, the game is at the same time extremely complex - so much so that even professional players cannot say that they
have, or can
ever, "master" the game. Thousands of people have dedicated their entire lives to Go, and serious students of the game spend extreme hours on their endless learning. They play lots of games with each other and with stronger players or teachers, replay and study pro games, mentally solve puzzles which require reading many moves and variations far ahead in their heads, and study all about each of many other aspects of the game such as opening development patterns, local corner-of-the-board patterns that get really complicated and intensely numerous (
"Joseki"), middlegame ideas, in-game counting and positional judgement, endgame tactics and concepts, and for lack of better translation, effective moves of
skillful finesse (
"Tesuji" in Japanese). But the list goes on...
Go cultivates various faculties of the mind and draws from them all to contribute towards the most efficient and effective tactics, the deepest and most accurate and logical strategies, and an overall display of logic, reasoning, flexibility, greed control/reasonability, choice making, risk management, self discipline, move reading, and of course multitasking (and more..).
Because the game tests player on this kind of wisdom and discipline and helps them improve upon these aspects of self, and for many other reasons overall, Go is an extremely deep and philosophical game with nothing to be desired in terms of large-scale strategy, small-scale tactics, mental cultivation, challenge (there is no end~), and fun!
(...and taste~ ;p)
Go is an absolutely brilliant game, and it is hard to believe that it was created by humans (in fact, we don't even know by whom!). Although at first, someone learning the elementary. fundamental tactics of Go may not yet have the privilege of seeing the true depth and awesomeness and wonder of Go to its true and unending extent, the more they learn the more they'll see it, the more they'll see how much they're
not seeing, and the more they
will be
amazed.
At the same time though, there is quite a lot of exclusive fun to be had via the process of learning and continually improving at the game, and of being at a level where Go is a
complete mystery and a maze
yet to become an innate kind of second-nature developed skill. In saying this, I imply that reaching that kind of innate feeling does happen (somewhat, anyway), it's just that despite that new feeling, and despite the ability to play relatively good moves repeatedly over and over in only a few seconds each if we want to, we despite development of this ability lose none of the room for self improvement or challenge in the game that we've ever had. Even though we can quickly play mostly-good moves - or at least
decent moves - playing faster
does usually reduce the quality of our moves.
Like the expanding universe, the Go world around us and all its challenges expands proportionately with us as we improve - or rather, it expands even faster than does our knowledge of Go.
"True knowledge is knowing that you know nothing."
Go is an assimilated part of me and will never escape me, for once it entered my life, it for a time was as my life itself - and by its own virtues, still is.
~
Yukigami
