Content-Type: text/html

# Go

HomePage | RecentChanges | Preferences
You can edit this page right now! It's a free, community project

Go is an extremely old board game, having been invented in China between 3000 and 4000 years ago. Nowadays, it is mostly played in China (where it is called wei-qi), Korea (baduk) and Japan. Only since the twentieth century has the game spread from Japan to the western world.

### What do you need to play go

A Go board (goban): A Go board is a board with 19 horizontal and 19 vertical lines. These form a grid of 361 intersections. For beginning players or short games, smaller boards of 13x13 or 9x9 intersections are sometimes used.

Two sets of stones (go-ishi), one black and one white. One player plays the black stones, the other the white ones.

### Rules of the game

The players alternate making moves, the black player starts. Making a move consists of putting a single stone on one of the intersections. Once played, a stone does not move, and remains at the same place unless it is captured. A player is allowed to pass instead of making a move.

A group of stones is any number of stones of the same color that are directly connected by the lines on the board.

When a stone, or a group of stones, is not connected to an empty intersection (by the lines of the board), it is captured. The complete group is taken off the board, and added to the opponent's prisoner bin.

When both players have passed, the game has ended, and counting begins. There are two methods of counting. In the Japanese counting method, which is also most usual in western countries, each player adds the number of stones he has captured to the number of empty intersections he has enclosed. In the Chinese counting method, prisoners are not counted, but a player counts every point that he controls - that is, all points where his stones are or that are completely surrounded by his stones. Whichever counting method is used, the player with most points wins. In normal circumstances, the difference between Chinese and Japanese counting is too small to be of influence on game play.

### Handicaps

To equalize games between players of different skills, handicaps can be used. Handicaps are given by having black (which in this case is the weaker player) play 2 or more stones (traditionally upto 9) as his first move. These initial stones must be played on the 9 marked intersections.

### Traditional Go Game Equipment

Although one could play Go with a piece of cardboard for a board and a bag of plastic chips, Go players pride themselves on their Go sets. The traditional Go board is solid wood and stands on its own attached legs. Players sit on mats (tatami) on the floor to play. The stones come in matching solid wood pots and are made out of shells (white) and slate (black) and are extremely smooth. However, such sets are not often used even in official tournament play. What mostly can be found at go clubs and tournaments in the West, are wooden boards but thinner than the traditional table boards and without legs, and glass stones, which are considered superior to plastic ones, although worse than shell and slate ones.

There is even an art to putting down a Go stone, firmly and between two particular fingers.

### Nature of the Game

Although the rules of Go are very simple, the game itself can be extremely complex. Go is a thinking game like chess and checkers, although often seen to be even more difficult than those. It is a highly strategical game, where decisions in one part of the board have to take the other parts of the board in account.

Although attempts have been made to program computers? to play Go, success in that area has been moderate at best. Even the strongest programs are no better than an average club player, and would easily be beaten by a strong player even getting a nine stone handicap.

### The Go World

Although traditionally the strongest players in the world came from Japan, China in the 1980s and South Korea in the 1990s have reached the same or even a higher level. Nowadays, top players from the three countries are approximately of the same strength. All three have professional competitions where there is sometimes a high amount of prize money.

Players from other countries are much weaker, except for some players who have taken up professional courses in one of these countries. American player Michael Redmond, who is a professional player in Japan, in 2000 became the first non-Asian player to reach 9 dan, the highest possible grade in Go.

### Additional resources

[Sensei's library] is a wiki devoted entirely to the game of go - it even has special markup for displaying go patterns.

HomePage | RecentChanges | Preferences
You can edit this page right now! It's a free, community project
Edit text of this page | View other revisions
Last edited August 9, 2001 7:42 am (diff)
Search: