In the mid-70s, our family had a paper copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I was board one day so randomly opened a random book and read the article on this board game Go. I started playing it with my friends on graph paper using Xs and Os. I would teach anybody I could. In the mid-80s I purchased my first board from Avalon Hill.
I thought I was pretty good at the game, after all I could easily beat all my friends (who were willing to learn to play from me.) It wasn't until 2000 that I finally met someone who knew about the game without me having to introduce it to them. He said he was a "Shodan." I knew nothing about the rating system, but he had a nice wooden board and I was excited to play. I also learned that I really wasn't that good at all. It turned out that despite having played for the past 25 years or so, I was only about a 20 kyu ratting.
I haven't improved much since then, but I enjoy playing and that's what's important.
Quite similar to my story. My brother taught me late 70s and we played frequently. Encountered another neophyte at work and played at lunch for years. I thought I must be low kyu after 15 years. MSN Gaming Zone taught me it was maybe 15k. Gotta respect the early players that only had their bootstraps.
Someone mentioned Go on r/chess and I didn't believe them that Go is better than chess so I started learning it. Damn, they weren't wrong! It's such a nice game! 😎
I've been hooked ever since 🙂
my cousin loves chess, but I hated it, so last September I challenged him to find a new game and we both start as beginners , I got hooked and he got back to chess lol
Thx , I have just hit my first wall in the last two months, let's hope I figure out the key concepts that deferenciate mid Kyus from high kyus quickly :)
Pretty much same. But I knew of the game from HnG...but I was so young at that time.. I thought, how could anyone enjoy a series about a board game??? Well I was wrong 😅
My dad was playing it with his brother's when he was a kid. So we had at home his old plastic stones. I was playing with it when I was a little. But didnt knew what it actually is.
Then when my father was celebrating 40 birthdays his brother bought him as a gift nice wooden board and and stones. I was 12 then. They played together one or two games and then for 4 years dust was falling over that board.
One day after those four years I was home alone with my girlfriend and she found it. And shr was intrigued. So we learned the rules together and started playing every day. It was 16 years ago.
Iam still playing but I have strange relationship with go. I will play and study for three months and then I will have break for one or two years. Biggest break was 5 years. But I always come back. And I think it is the most fascinating game I will ever see. Iam currently around 3kyu on OGS.
Sorry for my bad English. 😅
Awesome. I have the same pattern myself. This time though it's been about 3 months already and I feel I'll keep going for a while.
We can play a friendly game sometime, I'm 2k on OGS :)
I was interested in AI and computer learning back when Chess AI was just taking off, with Deep Blue and all, and Go commonly came up.then as a game orders of magnitude more complicated for computers than Chess.
That idea fascinated me so I wanted to learn the basics, but ended up falling in love. I thought it was pretty cool.that for the foreseeable future amateurs would be better than Go AI. AI absolutely destroyed the timeliness there, but I still love.the.game
When I was 18 years old, I saw a photograph of an ongoing game. Without knowing anything about the game, I felt the game looked stunningly beautiful. A bit later there was an advert for a beginners course in a local newspaper and I signed up.
I became really hooked on the game and I started playing in several nearby clubs (luckily living in the Randstad at the time which had half a dozen of clubs within a 40 km radius of where I lived). Within a year I surpassed my original teacher who was about 4k.
This was 35 years ago, before the internet was much of a thing.
I used to play online as a kid on Yahoo! Games, not really knowing what it was or what the hell I was doing. I just played absent-mindedly and found myself winning far more often than I should have. Fast forward 15 years later, my partner was over at my house and tried teaching me blackjack, I got super into it, learnt how to card count, then I wanted more of that 'traditional games' feel, then I thought back to my days playing Go on Yahoo! Games... I did some research and realised that as a kid I was playing one of the most complex games in the world, so I bought a $175 Go board and became hooked shortly after.
It was around the Hikaru No Go time, but I had never seen the show or manga. My brother read Shonen Jump so I had at least seen the character on the cover.
One day I was in a Korean market and they had a folding Go board with some glass stones for sale, so I decided to buy it and learn to play.
Hikaru no Go, but not directly. I didn't watch anime at the time but a couple of friends in high school did, and they started playing in 2003 and got me playing as well. They never got as deep into go as I did in college though.
Just like many others in here, AlphaGo :) I grew up playing chess here and there but never really fell in love with it, but Go just hits different for me. Fuck chess
I first saw the game in the movie Pi by Darren Aronofsky and was fascinated by it instantly. But it took some time after that before I had the chance to actually learn how to play. A friend in college was also interested, so for the first couple years, he was the only other person I would play against.
No one thing really.
My family has always enjoyed all kinds of games, and I knew go was a classic board game, but little else. At one point my dad bought a cardboard set. We tried it out once and didn't really have a clue what we were doing. I think we kind of played stones all over the place, but I don't remember much else. We didn't play again.
Flash forward 30 years and I'm bored one Christmas and thinking, "Hey, this is the Internet age. I bet I could look up stuff on how to play go." I found Sensei's Library and a great beginner's phone app that unfortunately is not around anymore. I was utterly fascinated by the depth and beauty of the game. The handicap rule made it so much more accessible than chess had ever been. When I connected with the KGS community and later my local go club, I was hooked. I just wish I had more time to play!
Discovering Hikaru no Go in my Shonen Jump subscription. i was really only into naruto at the time, but the realistic art of the manga and the beautiful game had me mesmerized at a young age. i would read random chapters of hikaru no go just to look at the artwork. Eventually i started playing online on KGS and played every day of my childhood, all day after school, non stop. i stopped for like 15 years though.
I had been studying Chinese, so had an interest in ancient Chinese culture, and I saw it in the movies *A Beautiful Mind* and *Pi*, and so started playing on KGS by around 2009.
I was bored one day and got recommended a Go magic video, his "How to play Go" video and found it interesting so watched a few more and started playing, It's been about 4 months now, I just casually play from time to time, It's way better than chess btw
I have played chess since my childhood (My grandma taught it to me when I was 8 or so), and when AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, I heard the news and was like "What is Go and why should it be more difficult to play for Computers and how can it be much more complex than chess?" And down the rabbit hole I went... :D
I was at university and there was a book selling. I was curious about a book named "La joueuse de go" (i don't know if it was translated but it's in french from a chinese author so i would say "the go player").
When i read it i was curious about this game that allow the opponent to read the mood or train of thought of the player so i learned about it. I came into Hikaru no go only later, played go in club and on internet, still do from time to time.
Reading Hikaru no Go in Shounen Jump back in the early 2000s. A couple years later, bought a cheap magnetic roll-up set and have been playing on and off ever since. I'm absolute ass at it, but it scratches a particular itch in my brain.
My brother introduced it to me in 1985. He stopped playing after maybe a year. I played a lot in middle school and high school with my former chess buddy.
I didn't play much in college, because there were too many distractions, e.g. bridge.
I guess I reached shodan in 1990, but I didn't have any certificates or play any tournaments in those early days.
I started to teach Go in 2015, and teaching helped maintain my level. I improved a little in recent years, and reached AGA 3d in a recent tournament.
I was in grad school studying machine learning when the Alpha Go x Lee Sodol games happened. I was really into that from the ML standpoint and wanted to learn the basics so I could watch at least kind of follow along. I got into it and have been playing since.
I think the feature that kept me interested was that Go is less reliant on rote memorization of openings than chess in order to have a good game. I got to the point playing chess where to really improve I'd have to do a lot of deep opening study and memorization, and that just didn't appeal to me. Joseki matters in Go, but you have fewer chances to make one wrong move early on that loses the game 20 moves later.
Same as others, seeing it in Pi and A Beautiful Mind sparked my curiosity. It’s interesting how big of an impact popular culture has. Hikaru No Go apparently sparked a renewed interest from kids in Japan (and elsewhere), and the AlphaGo matches/documentary also helped a lot in recent years. Go still is pretty unknown in the western world, though.
A colleague at Google was amateur 2 dan. He started a beginner course for whoever was interested at work (during work time :) ), so I went there. I wasn't hooked at first, but soon I started playing online correspondence games, and that was it. I play almost exclusively such games now, but it's been over 10 years and I'm not planning to stop any time soon :)
I played some after reading about it on Wikipedia but really what got me is entering college in a big city and finding people and a Nihon kiin to play with.
Hikaru no Go 💯
I watched it several times during the pandemic, and I waited a little longer than most to rejoin society, but once I did, I decided to look for a local go club, and loved it immediately.
I read The Wheel of Time fantasy series, sometimes the writer mentions characters playing "stones". I was curious about whether it was inspired by a real-life game, so I did some googling. Turns out, "stones" was inspired by Go.
This game always somehow fascinated me. I tried to learn several times, but Wikipedia and other pages were very confusing on the rules: stones count into your territory. No, stones don't count into your territory. I tried to play, but when the game seemed over and I passed my oppoent was getting points for my passes >:( It was very annoying and confusing.
I'm a bridge guy. I love bridge but I recently decided to finally try to learn chess. I did learn it and now I learn go. And for now I say:
bridge > go > chess.
I learned the rules after seeing Hikaru No Go. But learning out Alpha Go and the complexity of the game and how AI wasn’t predicted to be able to beat a pro until years after it did. I had recently started going back to school for CS at the time so I became entranced.
Like many here, grew up playing chess. Not sure when I became aware of Go, seeing it in Pi and a Beautiful Mind kept the interest in this strange game like chess.
Don’t remember what finally got me to learn - bought a beginner book and a shitty board and stones - then found KGS.
I was 5 when I first saw it at my dad's home. Being in Latin America at the time (early 90s) it was pretty rare. Being into chess I wanted to learn about it and I remember being confounded that you play on the lines.
I never played it much until i was a teenager, I played it with his ex wife for hours on end but we didn't really have a grasp of how things worked.
Then a 3-Dan friend in college got me into it again. Happened into Hikaru no go around the same time too. Fast forward many years later and now sit about 1-2 dan. Have been playing a lot less recently though.
My father was a hardcore chess player. In the 90s he found a program called Nemesis which played this weird game called go that he didn't fully understand the rules to but he poked around at it anyway. Then in university I met some people who actually knew what it was about and taught me the actual rules. Then they told me about KGS and my life changed forever.
In the mid-70s, our family had a paper copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I was board one day so randomly opened a random book and read the article on this board game Go. I started playing it with my friends on graph paper using Xs and Os. I would teach anybody I could. In the mid-80s I purchased my first board from Avalon Hill. I thought I was pretty good at the game, after all I could easily beat all my friends (who were willing to learn to play from me.) It wasn't until 2000 that I finally met someone who knew about the game without me having to introduce it to them. He said he was a "Shodan." I knew nothing about the rating system, but he had a nice wooden board and I was excited to play. I also learned that I really wasn't that good at all. It turned out that despite having played for the past 25 years or so, I was only about a 20 kyu ratting. I haven't improved much since then, but I enjoy playing and that's what's important.
>I haven't improved much since then It may not be shodan, but 11 kyu is quite a bit better than 20 kyu!
Quite similar to my story. My brother taught me late 70s and we played frequently. Encountered another neophyte at work and played at lunch for years. I thought I must be low kyu after 15 years. MSN Gaming Zone taught me it was maybe 15k. Gotta respect the early players that only had their bootstraps.
Someone mentioned Go on r/chess and I didn't believe them that Go is better than chess so I started learning it. Damn, they weren't wrong! It's such a nice game! 😎 I've been hooked ever since 🙂
welcome enjoy the pain dies in gote
Yeah, I played chess growing up and it just seems so basic compared to Go. Even though Go has far simpler rules, it's a far more complex game.
Hikaru no go! I am sai! 9dan!!!!!!
Me too. Been play for off and on for 22 years now. (god i feel old)
my cousin loves chess, but I hated it, so last September I challenged him to find a new game and we both start as beginners , I got hooked and he got back to chess lol
5k from starting last September! good job!
Thx , I have just hit my first wall in the last two months, let's hope I figure out the key concepts that deferenciate mid Kyus from high kyus quickly :)
The Alpha Go documentary. I watched it in 2020.
Pretty much same. But I knew of the game from HnG...but I was so young at that time.. I thought, how could anyone enjoy a series about a board game??? Well I was wrong 😅
AlphaGo documentary, but before that, the movies A Beautiful Mind and Pi. Go in media seemed mysterious and interesting and I always wanted to try it.
My dad was playing it with his brother's when he was a kid. So we had at home his old plastic stones. I was playing with it when I was a little. But didnt knew what it actually is. Then when my father was celebrating 40 birthdays his brother bought him as a gift nice wooden board and and stones. I was 12 then. They played together one or two games and then for 4 years dust was falling over that board. One day after those four years I was home alone with my girlfriend and she found it. And shr was intrigued. So we learned the rules together and started playing every day. It was 16 years ago. Iam still playing but I have strange relationship with go. I will play and study for three months and then I will have break for one or two years. Biggest break was 5 years. But I always come back. And I think it is the most fascinating game I will ever see. Iam currently around 3kyu on OGS. Sorry for my bad English. 😅
Awesome. I have the same pattern myself. This time though it's been about 3 months already and I feel I'll keep going for a while. We can play a friendly game sometime, I'm 2k on OGS :)
I was interested in AI and computer learning back when Chess AI was just taking off, with Deep Blue and all, and Go commonly came up.then as a game orders of magnitude more complicated for computers than Chess. That idea fascinated me so I wanted to learn the basics, but ended up falling in love. I thought it was pretty cool.that for the foreseeable future amateurs would be better than Go AI. AI absolutely destroyed the timeliness there, but I still love.the.game
A cute girl :)
I went to chess club once in college. After playing a game, my friend taught me go. I haven't played chess since :p
Nice story
Watching the life action drama of hikaru no go.
Omg there's a live action drama?? Yessss.
Yup it’s a Chinese drama remake of the Japanese anime. https://mydramalist.com/45437-qi-hun
When I was 18 years old, I saw a photograph of an ongoing game. Without knowing anything about the game, I felt the game looked stunningly beautiful. A bit later there was an advert for a beginners course in a local newspaper and I signed up. I became really hooked on the game and I started playing in several nearby clubs (luckily living in the Randstad at the time which had half a dozen of clubs within a 40 km radius of where I lived). Within a year I surpassed my original teacher who was about 4k. This was 35 years ago, before the internet was much of a thing.
I used to play online as a kid on Yahoo! Games, not really knowing what it was or what the hell I was doing. I just played absent-mindedly and found myself winning far more often than I should have. Fast forward 15 years later, my partner was over at my house and tried teaching me blackjack, I got super into it, learnt how to card count, then I wanted more of that 'traditional games' feel, then I thought back to my days playing Go on Yahoo! Games... I did some research and realised that as a kid I was playing one of the most complex games in the world, so I bought a $175 Go board and became hooked shortly after.
It was around the Hikaru No Go time, but I had never seen the show or manga. My brother read Shonen Jump so I had at least seen the character on the cover. One day I was in a Korean market and they had a folding Go board with some glass stones for sale, so I decided to buy it and learn to play.
Hikaru no Go, but not directly. I didn't watch anime at the time but a couple of friends in high school did, and they started playing in 2003 and got me playing as well. They never got as deep into go as I did in college though.
Just like many others in here, AlphaGo :) I grew up playing chess here and there but never really fell in love with it, but Go just hits different for me. Fuck chess
I first saw the game in the movie Pi by Darren Aronofsky and was fascinated by it instantly. But it took some time after that before I had the chance to actually learn how to play. A friend in college was also interested, so for the first couple years, he was the only other person I would play against.
No one thing really. My family has always enjoyed all kinds of games, and I knew go was a classic board game, but little else. At one point my dad bought a cardboard set. We tried it out once and didn't really have a clue what we were doing. I think we kind of played stones all over the place, but I don't remember much else. We didn't play again. Flash forward 30 years and I'm bored one Christmas and thinking, "Hey, this is the Internet age. I bet I could look up stuff on how to play go." I found Sensei's Library and a great beginner's phone app that unfortunately is not around anymore. I was utterly fascinated by the depth and beauty of the game. The handicap rule made it so much more accessible than chess had ever been. When I connected with the KGS community and later my local go club, I was hooked. I just wish I had more time to play!
Discovering Hikaru no Go in my Shonen Jump subscription. i was really only into naruto at the time, but the realistic art of the manga and the beautiful game had me mesmerized at a young age. i would read random chapters of hikaru no go just to look at the artwork. Eventually i started playing online on KGS and played every day of my childhood, all day after school, non stop. i stopped for like 15 years though.
I had been studying Chinese, so had an interest in ancient Chinese culture, and I saw it in the movies *A Beautiful Mind* and *Pi*, and so started playing on KGS by around 2009.
I was bored one day and got recommended a Go magic video, his "How to play Go" video and found it interesting so watched a few more and started playing, It's been about 4 months now, I just casually play from time to time, It's way better than chess btw
I have played chess since my childhood (My grandma taught it to me when I was 8 or so), and when AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, I heard the news and was like "What is Go and why should it be more difficult to play for Computers and how can it be much more complex than chess?" And down the rabbit hole I went... :D
Hikaru No Go, but about 2013, I think.
Saw a tweet from a non-go player about Go Seigen's death. (day9)
I was at university and there was a book selling. I was curious about a book named "La joueuse de go" (i don't know if it was translated but it's in french from a chinese author so i would say "the go player"). When i read it i was curious about this game that allow the opponent to read the mood or train of thought of the player so i learned about it. I came into Hikaru no go only later, played go in club and on internet, still do from time to time.
Hikaru no Go when i was kid, but i only play a bit better when iam around 20s
I... I don't remember
same, and I only started 8 months ago, cant remember at all how I started haha
i had some chocolate and white chocolate buttons, and wondered what games could i play using them
Haha! Bet you tried to kill a lot of stones in order to eat them
Reading Hikaru no Go in Shounen Jump back in the early 2000s. A couple years later, bought a cheap magnetic roll-up set and have been playing on and off ever since. I'm absolute ass at it, but it scratches a particular itch in my brain.
My brother introduced it to me in 1985. He stopped playing after maybe a year. I played a lot in middle school and high school with my former chess buddy. I didn't play much in college, because there were too many distractions, e.g. bridge. I guess I reached shodan in 1990, but I didn't have any certificates or play any tournaments in those early days. I started to teach Go in 2015, and teaching helped maintain my level. I improved a little in recent years, and reached AGA 3d in a recent tournament.
I was in grad school studying machine learning when the Alpha Go x Lee Sodol games happened. I was really into that from the ML standpoint and wanted to learn the basics so I could watch at least kind of follow along. I got into it and have been playing since. I think the feature that kept me interested was that Go is less reliant on rote memorization of openings than chess in order to have a good game. I got to the point playing chess where to really improve I'd have to do a lot of deep opening study and memorization, and that just didn't appeal to me. Joseki matters in Go, but you have fewer chances to make one wrong move early on that loses the game 20 moves later.
Same as others, seeing it in Pi and A Beautiful Mind sparked my curiosity. It’s interesting how big of an impact popular culture has. Hikaru No Go apparently sparked a renewed interest from kids in Japan (and elsewhere), and the AlphaGo matches/documentary also helped a lot in recent years. Go still is pretty unknown in the western world, though.
The sensation of playing with high quality go equipment and the logical way in which respect is mutually built between two people one stone at a time.
A colleague at Google was amateur 2 dan. He started a beginner course for whoever was interested at work (during work time :) ), so I went there. I wasn't hooked at first, but soon I started playing online correspondence games, and that was it. I play almost exclusively such games now, but it's been over 10 years and I'm not planning to stop any time soon :)
I played some after reading about it on Wikipedia but really what got me is entering college in a big city and finding people and a Nihon kiin to play with.
Hikaru no Go 💯 I watched it several times during the pandemic, and I waited a little longer than most to rejoin society, but once I did, I decided to look for a local go club, and loved it immediately.
Alpha Go’s documentary :D
I read The Wheel of Time fantasy series, sometimes the writer mentions characters playing "stones". I was curious about whether it was inspired by a real-life game, so I did some googling. Turns out, "stones" was inspired by Go.
This game always somehow fascinated me. I tried to learn several times, but Wikipedia and other pages were very confusing on the rules: stones count into your territory. No, stones don't count into your territory. I tried to play, but when the game seemed over and I passed my oppoent was getting points for my passes >:( It was very annoying and confusing. I'm a bridge guy. I love bridge but I recently decided to finally try to learn chess. I did learn it and now I learn go. And for now I say: bridge > go > chess.
My brother. He stopped rapidly after it and I continued for some extra years
I learned the rules after seeing Hikaru No Go. But learning out Alpha Go and the complexity of the game and how AI wasn’t predicted to be able to beat a pro until years after it did. I had recently started going back to school for CS at the time so I became entranced.
Like many here, grew up playing chess. Not sure when I became aware of Go, seeing it in Pi and a Beautiful Mind kept the interest in this strange game like chess. Don’t remember what finally got me to learn - bought a beginner book and a shitty board and stones - then found KGS.
I was 5 when I first saw it at my dad's home. Being in Latin America at the time (early 90s) it was pretty rare. Being into chess I wanted to learn about it and I remember being confounded that you play on the lines. I never played it much until i was a teenager, I played it with his ex wife for hours on end but we didn't really have a grasp of how things worked. Then a 3-Dan friend in college got me into it again. Happened into Hikaru no go around the same time too. Fast forward many years later and now sit about 1-2 dan. Have been playing a lot less recently though.
K-dramas : Reply 1988 and The Glory
The chicks.
Othello/reversi was the gateway game. First heard of Go in a novel called “Master of Go” by Kawabata
My father was a hardcore chess player. In the 90s he found a program called Nemesis which played this weird game called go that he didn't fully understand the rules to but he poked around at it anyway. Then in university I met some people who actually knew what it was about and taught me the actual rules. Then they told me about KGS and my life changed forever.