Ordinary things, like go

[tquid]

Had a lovely weekend. There was a party for the ref's in the Terminal City Roller Girls roller derby crew, and they're all great people, as well as being stunningly sexy. At the party, there were two other people who also play go/weiqi/baduk and one of them was . . . very, very attractive. (The other one was a nice fellow-geek who is completely not

Comments

[tquid]

Pedantry: Othello™ is the trademarked term; Reversi is generic.

If your tactics are good on 9x9, even good enough to stand up when you're giving a big handicap, well, I just can't see that is somehow cheating by "turning 9x9 go into Othello." They really aren't the same, though some skills may transfer. Sounds like you're probably just pretty good at games with strong tactics. I must repeat again, more adamantly: 9x9 go is real go, period. It's a different size and the positional aspect is obviously compressed, but it's a perfectly fine game in itself and has all the same rules as go on a 19x19 board.

OK, rant over. You picked a great beginner's book, it's what I started with. Vol. II is also great, and after that people get to having different opinions. I'm a big fan of Kageyama's Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go but others dislike the chatty style and feel it's not so well-suited for beginners. In general I think Ms. Kim's books take several pages and diagrams to talk about what a typical Kiseido Press book will handle in one. That is no bad thing if you're really new but may be a bit boring if you have gotten good at reading go books (something that could do with an article all its own). You, by the way, are enormously lucky to live near the Kinokuniya bookstore, which carries those books.

Online is kind of where it's at in go these days. My favourite arena, not that I've played there much at all, is Kiseido's own Kiseido Go Server at http://www.gokgs.com. It has a quite good-looking java client and the people are very friendly, not to mention almost disturbingly ready to play--just set up a challenge and people will be crawling on you like you're at a fervently intense meat market.

For slower games that are at an email pace, there's sensei's page on turn-based go servers. I'm on dragon but haven't done anything with it yet.

I'd be happy to play either of you guys! I'm digging on this stuff.

[iphy]

I am surprised to learn that Reversi is not trademarked. I thought there was a game marketed under that name, too.

[iphy]

Also, I was not saying 9x9 was not real Go. We've played small board, 13x13, and full board. With much the same results regardless. Reversi is not real Go.