Recently, I had a bit of fun teaching Go to a friend, who had recently bought a magnetic set and wanted to learn.

For those of you that don't know (if that AlphaGo excitement never caught ya), Go is a game with very simple rules and is about surrounding territory. Each player takes turns to place a stone on a 19x19 grid. If a group of stones is completely surrounded, it is considered captured and removed from the board, counting as extra points for the player that captured it.

Simple rules, but insanely complex. The ultimate game.

Teaching

As a beginner, at least in my case anyway, we are focused on the capturing mechanic. Maybe we are told about various principles such as focusing on corners first. But we get greedy trying to capture pieces and a mean opponent (not me) will quickly rip our pieces into shreds.

What was rather interesting in my recent teaching was that this was not happening. On the other hand we played a relatively boring game with well defined boundaries, where I could explain territorial concepts like how to secure a boundary and how to kill an invasion.

Probably someone picking up Go needs both styles of learning, where one can iterate quickly to improve and fail fast, in addition to various concepts.

A Particularly Fun Game

After the teaching game, I played a game with someone with slightly more experience. Both of these games were on a smaller 9x9 board which is suitable for teaching basics quickly.

You'll see that we had to resort to blocking off the boundary with two strips of paper.

I think this was a particularly fun one where I played as white. The board split into four groups fighting for territory. The bottom left almost got killed as well, but I managed to squeak by with seki (mutual life), a stalemate-like situation where neither group can be killed. Later we analyzed that one small adjustment to my opponent's stone sequence could have killed me. The result was a tie game in points, though that means the game goes to White, who moves second.

Woah!

Gasp... Looking at the board again, I completely missed an opportunity for black to move and kill the upper left region. I'll leave it to the Go aficionado reader to go find the sequence and leave a comment :)

(And as @freedomshift noted in comments, kills the bottom left as well. All dead!)

Sigh, the beauty that this game contains is boundless. As you can tell from my mistake, I am not that strong of a player. Perhaps I'll revisit in a later post some fun Go principles that can also be applied to life.

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