The game of Go

Tonight seems to be an especially appropriate night to advertise one to the greatest board game ever invented, toppling even chess, namely, the game of Go (I am capitalizing it to differentiate it from the verb, but one really doesn't have to).

(If bored, skip to the end and watch a somewhat fun cartoon.)

Go has greater depth than chess (see also about Go and mathematics); its rules are simple (in East Asia children start playing it from the ages of three to five), much simpler than those of chess (in fact, there are only about three rules); it has only one kind of piece, and its board is bigger, forcing one to excel both in strategy and in tactics.

After a while of playing chess, I have reached the point where I realized that I cannot progress any further without memorizing openings. The grandmasters of highest levels just go through different combinations of openings, attacks, defenses, and so on, on each other. Oftentimes it's as much about psychology as about the game itself. A computer can beat the humans easily, because it can iterate all the possible variations very quickly. All this led me to lose interest in chess; there was not enough art, not enough creativity in it; it seemed all about simple memorization of combinations and reiteration of the moves in one's head.


(yes, they look like a couple of dorks to me too)

About the same time I was losing interest in chess (in the freshman year of college, when I was playing two to five chess games a day on Yahoo), I discovered Go. Actually, I was doing a project for my Java class (no pun intended) and first discovered Othello and then Go.

Go has both strategy and tactics. It has both spatial and reiterative reasoning. Both analytical and intuitive. It's as much about art as about science. And the strongest computer can hardly beat a strong non-professional player.

Go stimulates both left and right hemispheres, both prefrontal and parietal corteces, both hippocampus and basal ganglia. Although there is a bit of learning involved, it's mostly learning of previous games that develops your "sense" for Go and of focused tactical combinations (joseki); plus, one can advance quite high without learning and simply playing away, discovering the game for yourself. In any event, even if one tends to focus more on learning than on practice (I met someone once who had reached the level of 1 dan this way), learning merely develops your view of the game; memorization won't help you much.

The point of Go is to create living groups of connected stones and encircle territory. Its point is to build bases and exert influence over regions. Its point is to balance ambitiousness and caution, perseverance and ability to let go, attention to detail and ability to look at the great picture.



Its rules, as I said, are very simple. But it is said that one does not begin to understand what Go is all about until one loses first 100 games. And it takes a lifetime of playing to really discover the game; through that discovery, you master the game, but the game also changes you, making you a stronger, more balanced individual, a better decision maker. Go is the closest phenomenon to learning of Talmud (from many different aspects) that I have discovered in the non-Jewish world.



In East Asia, people win more on Go tournaments than in Europe and US they win on chess tournaments. Back in the day, if a child, say, in Korea, was discovered to have a talent for Go, he was sent to Japan to study in a special academy (whose regime and philosophy very much resembled that of, lehavdil, yeshivos). If he became good at it, he could support his whole family. Go was considered one of the arts, which every samurai was expected to know — it was part of his wholesomeness as a human being, just like in Ancient Greece being a sophron, a thinker, was a requirement for a complete human.



In Go culture, beauty and art are very much appreciated. Although one can use cheep wooden boards and stones made of plastic or glass, professionals and aficionados tend to use stones made of special rare shells and little Go tables (called gobans) made of the special ancient wood that makes a resonating sound when a stone is placed on it (plus, a temporary indentation is formed where the stone is placed).

One can read about Go superficially on Wikipedia in this article, but the best place to learn about Go is Sensei's Library. There are Go clubs in most major cities of the US, where people will welcome you and play a few games with you (did I mention there is a special handicap system which allows people of different skill levels of skill play with each other without the game being too boring or too difficult?).

One can play online for free at KGS Go Server (I recommend learning about the game, learning the rules and reading a little about basic tactics and strategy first... or a few fun facts).

It's very difficult to find a non-stupid clip of a sample game. In any event, this is a recording a famous Go game, but you won't understand much in it until you learn the rules (also, make sure to turn off the sound while listening to it, whether you're a man or a woman — trust me), so you can pay attention to the aesthetics of the game for now:



In Japan, there was a recent increase in interest in Go amongst children and youth after a manga (and later, cartoon) series was created featuring a boy who discovers Go. I always thought something like this could be done about, lehavdil, learning Torah.