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Anyone here play? I'm kinda interested in watching how a game plays out, don't know the rules myself but I kinda wanted to try my hand at it after being reminded of the excellent Hikaru no Go anime. Anyway, is anyone decent at go here?
In Soviet Russia, Civilization Micros You!
"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
“I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”
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Well, I half-way wish I was awesome at go ... but as I haven't actually played it yet ...
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I played a decent amount in college, and for a few years afterwards, until the time invested vs. reward curve started flattening out. What are you looking for? There are lots of places to play online, like IGS and KGS. There are many life-and-death problems to work on - I recommend Graded Go Problems for Beginners if you want to get some books to practice with. All of the Go clients can replay famous stored games, but honestly I wouldn't bother with those except for the "oh, wow" factor until you've gotten your feet wet with playing against other people who are at your skill level. The pro-dan matches are indistinguishable from magic, as far as I'm concerned.
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cabacon Wrote:The pro-dan matches are indistinguishable from magic, as far as I'm concerned.
Sig material.
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In response to cabacon, I'm not good at exact planning but I'm pretty good at intuiting so I'm curious at getting decent at a game that's not as straight jacketted as chess.
In Soviet Russia, Civilization Micros You!
"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
“I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”
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Joined: Jan 2011
I understand the rules but have never really played. If somebody can point us all to a decent online site where we could track games I would be happy to give another beginner a game
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Yeah I'm kinda looking for some sort of game where every move's reason is explained so my intent was to see if anyone could play a game and post their move logic.
In Soviet Russia, Civilization Micros You!
"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
“I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”
Posts: 19
Threads: 4
Joined: Nov 2009
antisocialmunky Wrote:Yeah I'm kinda looking for some sort of game where every move's reason is explained so my intent was to see if anyone could play a game and post their move logic.
Whatever you do, you need some kind of SGF client. They will let you follow the game, see the comments, and follow the alternate branches. I don't know what OS you're on, but they're not hard to find; many of them are java and cross-platform. If you want to see games by beginners, you can look at the Go Teaching Ladder for commented games. There are two commented games at this page, search for "Game Record 1".
If you want to play against people, try KGS or IGS. If you'd like to play a game against me, I'd be happy to play sometime; we could also PBEM it using an SGF editor.
One of the things I love about Go is that people of all different abilities can play together and have fun. The handicapping system is fantastic. You win by having a high score, so you can handicap with points if the two players are closely (but unevenly) matched. You can fix a bigger mismatch by letting the weaker player have a few stones played on the board before the game starts.
But really, to start, you can play a 9x9 game to get the feel of close-up tactics. Then you move up to a 13x13 board to get a taste for how different tactical areas can influence each other. Finally, you can move up to 19x19, where the interplay of local and global strategy becomes super fun. 
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Can you make the board bigger?
In Soviet Russia, Civilization Micros You!
"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
“I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”
Posts: 19
Threads: 4
Joined: Nov 2009
antisocialmunky Wrote:Can you make the board bigger?
Bigger than 19x19? I suppose you could, but I haven't heard of people doing that. A quick google later, and I can say, yes some people do, but it's not very common. Apparently there's a guy on KGS who likes to play at 37x37. I'm not sure I could put that much time into a single game, but maybe that's standard for Civ players! 
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