The Road Less Traveled

go

Go is an ancient Asian game of strategy, played by alternating placing black and white stones on a 19×19 grid. For more information, see the Wikipedia entry.

Starting in 2005, I gained interest in Go from a friend of mine — who no longer plays. He had learned of it, as far as I know, from the anime Hikaru no Go. I had heard of the anime, but didn’t know what it was about, and everything I saw about it made it look dumb. At the beginning I played mainly on Yahoo. I got to about the equivalent of 28k before I quit, because I simply could not win — I realize now that I was looking at the game entirely incorrectly.

I didn’t play again for about a year, until the middle of March 2006, when I had a revelation and picked the game up again. By April I had progressed to 22k, and that month played 169 games (though quite a few of those were against bots ore on small boards). By May I reached 21k and basically ran up against a wall. I entered Category 7 of the Iwamoto 2006 tournament and held onto my hopes. With the between-round coaching of the Pittsburgh Go Club, I was able to overcome my wall, get 2nd place in the tournament, and advance to 16k by the end of June.

Through July of 2006, I kept up my pace of more than 1 game per day average, but didn’t really advance any further. In September 2006, I jumped ranked to 10k, but had hit a wall, burnt out, and quit the game again. Juggling work and school and under enough stress as it is, I didn’t have time for the intense go regimen that I’d put myself through before, and didn’t touch the game again for half a year.

When I came back in April 2007, I had jumped in rank again, this time to 7k. I registered for the Iwamoto 2007 tournament in Category 4b. I won the first round, lost the second, won the third, lost the fourth and gave up. I dropped the tournament and go with it (again).

In 2008, I didn’t play Go again until I came to Japan in September. I played with a friend who was much weaker than me a couple times, but didn’t really know how strong I was. I estimated, following my previous jumps in strength after lapses of not playing, that I was about 3 kyu. This was probably true. After I came to Japan, I found out about a meeting of some professors at my university who play the game, and went to it 3 times — once in each of October, November, and December. I have not been back since. They encouraged me to take up the game again seriously, but I did not oblige.

The last two weeks of February 2009, I was on a trip to a small town in the middle of nowhere in Japan. I played 5 games against a Japanese 3d amateur, Mr. Suzuki. The first game I played with a 3 stone handicap, and was beaten pretty badly. I resigned. The next game was with 4 stones, and I lost by 20 points or so. The next two games I only lost by 6 and 7 points respectively (both at 4 stones). The final game, both of us were very tired, and I ended up resigning early on in the game.

These five games inspired me to get better at go. Since then I have progressed to probably the Japanese 1d level. I will be training myself at go parlors on days off, and with a professional twice a week. I hope to get as strong as I possibly can in the next year. I wonder how far that’ll be…