Self Review 01

This is a light review of a game I played a few days ago on KGS. My rank on KGS is a bit behind where I think my actual rank is, so I'm trying to play often in order to rank up. Let's start out with a recent loss:

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I am going to be continually refining the HTML of this blog and these diagrams, so things may look different in the future. I hope the interface isn't too buggy.

A Journeyman's First Year

I learned the basic rules of Go when I was about thirteen, reading the Hikaru no Go manga for the first time. I played briefly online, but over the next ten years for the most part only played against people I had taught myself. At my peak of this period, I was perhaps 15 kyu, and more often 17 - 20 kyu. I'd only skimmed through a single book (In the Beginning, by  Ishigure Ikuro), and had next to nothing in the way of theory. I'd never even heard the term "cut" with relation to Go. This was my standing as of February 2015. I'd known the rules for a decade, but was still a rank beginner.

I moved to New York City at the end of 2014, and my roommate P— brought a Go board with him into our new apartment. We played a few times a week as a friendly rivalry, but when he started looking for games online, I wasn't very interested. I preferred the game as a personal tool, something that I maintained with my friends, but not a competitive activity involving disembodied strangers.

Then P— decided to try watching Hikaru no Go the anime for the first time, and I was drawn in by curiosity, not having read the manga in years. Only a few episodes in, I could feel a curious itch in my gut. "I want to be strong at this game," I thought. "How good might I be able to get? How hard can I work for it?"

P— and I started playing more. I created an account on the Internet Go Server. I started looking up what Go books were available for free online (far more than I was expecting, it turns out). I joined the Gotham Go Club in Manhattan, and showed up every week. And my rank started to rise. P— and I made exhilirating progress in those first few months. It only took about six weeks of effort for us to go from 17 kyu or so to 10 kyu, far faster than we'd thought. With these early successes, I started dedicating more and more of my time to the game. Life and Death problems, five games a day online, books queued up on my phone, until I was putting in a minimum of three hours a day into the game. I knew I was starting late as a Go player, and I felt I had a duty to work to make up the difference if I was actually serious about this game.

It's been at the time of this writing between eight and nine months since I started my Go training in earnest. My current rank is unstable, and varies widely based on my mood, but on a good day I'm fairly competitive on a 2 kyu level. For a while now I've been itching to reach the Shodan rank within my first year, and while I still hold out on that, my progress has slowed considerably in the last few months, and it's going to take another effort of will for me to break through my current barrier. But such concrete goals aside, I've been pleased with my progress. The focus I have been able muster up for Go outdoes any other activity I've approached in my life, simply in terms of consistent, daily effort and noticeable improvement. This year has taught me tremendous things about my work ethic and what I'm able to accomplish with discipline. I am still a poor Go player, and if my goal is to be "strong", which was my stated intention at the outset, then I still fall far short of that mark. But I'm optimistic about what I'll be able to achieve in the years ahead of me, and with luck this blog will help me categorize my learning process, follow through on goals, and expose me more to the community of players of which I want to be a part.

Wandering the Land of Go

Some things thrust themselves into existence -- mathematics, language, time, geometry-- such that once conceived,  they seem as if they had always been there. These emergent patterns, that impose order on what before seemed chaotic, are the most delightful facets of this world to me. All of my private artistic achievements pale in comparison to those poetries that spring out of nothing, entirely of their own accord, apparently beyond even the will of God. To meld one's own creativity with those self-sustaining entities is the among the truest and most rewarding paths I can imagine.

So I bring myself to the divine Game of Go. Two fundamental rules (the placement of stones, and the condition for their removal); two exceptional rules (those of ko and seki); and one rule for evaluating a winner (counting territory). From these absurdly simple dictates emerges an entire new world, utterly unlike our own, yet intelligible to our human minds. I like to say that playing Go is like learning martial arts in a different reality, with wholly different physical laws and ontologies (in a similar vein, the incomparable Takemiya Masaki states that Go is more akin to dance than war). The shapes and strategies of Go were fully formed at its inception, independent of the will of its players.

What I have so far described of Go is, I admit, in some sense true of all games. Indeed, the naming of rules necessarily imparts these sort of emergent properties into the skilful play of any game. However, Go holds a special place, in my own reasoning at least, for the utter simplicity of its laws, and the immense depth of action permitted by those laws. No other game I have experience with spawns such diversity of structures, such flexibility of evolution, and such artistry of individual touch as the Game of Go. But discussions of the supremacy of one game over another are rather beside the point. Go is the game that has struck me personally, that silently eggs me on. It is the game at which a tiny part of my soul insists: "I must become strong!"

What can one say about the strange world of the Go stones? I am a very recent arrival in this wondrous place, and its topography is yet vague and unfamiliar to me. I can say that it is a place of remarkable balance and fairness, of growth and decay, of subtlety and individuality, all purified by raw competition. I cherish its vivid aesthetic, its narrative power, its pantheon of storied heroes. Traveling through the Land of Go is like having a second life, a chance to live in another way and find secrets hidden within oneself, and it is a chance I do not intend to pass up. All that is asked of me is diligent effort and unswerving enthusiasm.

I love this game. It is a cruel terrain, and I have already been discouraged many times, but so far I have managed to press on, driven by snatches of beauty and exhiliration. I can see the peaks ahead of me, and I want nothing more than to scale even the least of them, and look around at a landscape suddenly made clear.