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Any good free iPhone Go apps that you guys know of? Got a long bus ride ahead of me and figured that learning how to play Go would be a good way to spend a few hours.
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Oct 30, 2013 09:41
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I don't have an iPhone but check this out, it has a list of free apps. SmartGo is generally considered the best app if you do decide to drop some cash. Also, if anyone is interested, one of our players is hopefully doing a lecture on KGS (should enough people turn up) at around 9pm GMT tonight. It will be about shape, which is definitely a beautiful and interesting subject that is of benefit to all ranks.
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Oct 30, 2013 09:50
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Yay, a new thread! I've played casually for a few years, and started going to a local club every week. 3 months in, I went from 20k to about 13k within the club, and made like a dozen new friends, and I'm only getting better. I highly recommend Go for anyone that even kinda thinks skill-based board gaming is interesting. Now that OGS is Nova, does the OGS android app still work? I'd get down on some turn based games if my phone yelled at me about them every day.
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Oct 30, 2013 10:54
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I don't think the old OGS app works any more, but it's worth checking. The devs are currently beta testing the new Android app they've got in development, so that will be addressed soon. Actually, it's a pretty solid browser experience anyway, so although I haven't tried it on mobile, you can certainly play on a tablet via the browser just fine.
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Oct 30, 2013 11:07
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surc posted:
I'm having a lot more luck playing against humans and having other people, namely Oiseaux and Xyven, review the games for me. And to anyone who's reading this thread that hasn't played yet, do it. The game is intimidating and there's tons of information to learn, but you can seriously have fun only knowing the bare basics. (And then have people tell you why you're bad.) I'm also reading this senseis.xmp.net that was linked in the OP, and there's a lot of reading there; I like it.
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Oct 30, 2013 12:08
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Master posted:Questions for some of the go-people out there: ----J----[{@ I consider myself to be a true disciple of the Japanese art Go game. My primary KGS play account, ANIMEKING, currently has a 3rd dan ranking, making my "Hand Talk" moves quite powerful. I know a great deal of joseki (Japanese for Hand Talk combo attacks at the beginning of the board game) and my knowledge of the Hikaru No Go Japanese Anime is encyclopedic. ----A----[{@ I have been playing this mystical art from Japan since the year 2007, when I discovered Hikaru no Go during one of my college Otaku classes that I attended just to see how bad everyone else's knowledge of Anime was. I had never heard of it. On that day I learned the #1 Japanese Igo mantra (called aji in Japanese): Humility is the pathway to excellent future combo attacks. I 'got it' instantly. I'm an IT guy and systems and critical thinking are, quite literally, my bread and butter. Only Igo combines the raw analytic power of computer science mathematics with the intense beauty of Japan and Anime. I was hooked from day one. ----P----[{@ Big go players? Start with some of the more accessible guys: Nakasaka Wasasuji, Japawanza Itto, Igasuka Njimbo, The guy who looks like that electronic horse android in Tenchu Cyber Neon Saga, some online players like g0mast3r [9d], EpicTurtle [9d], nanjing77 [9d], HandTalker [9d], and of course, people like Princess Mononoke and the toadstool from Super Mario Bros. ----A----[{@ I no longer play much in person due to complications from my smelly acne face. I have an enormous probably 100 lb. Goban made from exquisite Japanese Fusuma wood and crafted by hand by a mysterious monk warrior. I got it in the mail for my 20th birthday from the IT company JapanTech Enterprises who have connections with the monk's mystical temple because over there, in Japan, companies actual provide spiritual sustenance to their IT employees and even have them meditate before they start coding (something Americans could learn from). ----N----[{@ Game in person only get messed up if my opponent is an ignorant American who cannot Hand Talk with elegance like my Japanese brethren (I'm latino, btw, but I consider my spiritual race Japanese). Also if my smelly face acne gets too drippy I have to excuse myself to the college bathroom where I wet little bits of paper towels and try to soak up all the pus and then dry the craters out with those hand washy blowers. The real boards and stones are only unruly if you are very crude and don't know things about carp fish and the cherry blossom. Your welcome for my post, -ANIMEKING
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Oct 30, 2013 12:24
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Always happy to learn more about Tavern-ish games to play with my friends. I feel like I've played this at some point in the past, but it could just be false memories.
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Oct 30, 2013 13:03
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About a decade and a half ago I used to play a lot of Reversi/Othello and became quite decent at it. Will that make it any easier to get into Go? Some of the concepts seems similar though from the look of it it seems controlling the sides/corners isn't as vital.
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Oct 30, 2013 13:16
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I really hate this game. Like, it's genuinely the most frustrating board game I've ever played. I can understand why people hitting other people with Go boards is a whole genre of historical art. I want to get good at it, though. How do I? I've read "just play a million games" in a bunch of places, and I'm kinda working towards it, but I've played quite a few already and I don't feel like I'm learning anything. I actually kinda have fun with ko battles and 'fighting', but pretty much every time I do the other guy just randomly puts a stone somewhere else at some point  Basically the strategic part of Go feels like Battleships to me. I don't know where to place my stones and I don't know why the other guy is placing his stones where he is and why he can sometimes place his stones in the middle of my stones and take a bunch of territory even though I have way more stones than him. I just randomly lose, which isn't cool! At least in Chess I can kinda think "ohhh, I lost that piece because I moved my bishop there" or whatever.
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Oct 30, 2013 13:16
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Has the Interactive Way to Go been posted? It's probably the best thing a beginner can read. http://playgo.to/iwtg/en/ Jack the Lad posted:Basically the strategic part of Go feels like Battleships to me. I don't know where to place my stones and I don't know why the other guy is placing his stones where he is and why he can sometimes place his stones in the middle of my stones and take a bunch of territory even though I have way more stones than him. It should help understand how "2 eyes" makes a group into a "living" group that can't be taken. Phyzzle fucked around with this message at 14:19 on Oct 30, 2013 |
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Oct 30, 2013 14:08
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Phyzzle posted:Has the Interactive Way to Go been posted? It's probably the best thing a beginner can read. I've read a bit about that, yeah, but the example shapes never seem to end up happening in actual games. I don't mean people are putting stones inside a connected group of my stones, but that they're putting stones in my "territory", often between my stones and the edge of the board, and even though they start out with 1 stone to my 3-6 in the area are able to either capture my stones or fill in a lot of the empty space and make it worthless.
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Oct 30, 2013 14:16
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I'll never get used to losing at Go. In fact I think losing is steadily getting worse as I get better at the game. That's because I can now dance circles around the noobest of noobs and I feel so loving intelligent when they can't grasp what I'm actually doing, or when I come up with a particularly novel or creative move. Knowing the joy of tapdancing on the remnants of someone's patience and self-esteem as a Player of Games only makes the flood of shame when I get out-thought and outplayed even worse.
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Oct 30, 2013 14:17
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Jack the Lad posted:I really hate this game. Like, it's genuinely the most frustrating board game I've ever played. I can understand why people hitting other people with Go boards is a whole genre of historical art. Yeah, in a certain way this game is indeed a journey of self-discovery because drat if this game didn't bring out some of the worst aspects of my personality. Anyway who cares about winning of losing amirite, go play baduk because ITGO has some of the nicest and coolest fellas that's what I say.
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Oct 30, 2013 15:19
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we also have ANIMEKING
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Oct 30, 2013 15:55
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I like Go. I like playing Go. I wish I was good at Go. But I'm too lazy to put in the effort to become good at Go.
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Oct 30, 2013 16:25
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uXs posted:I like Go. I like playing Go. I wish I was good at Go. The problem I have is I'm willing to put in the effort but it doesn't seem to really do anything. Even after I lose I can't really see why, unlike in (for example) Chess.
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Oct 30, 2013 16:27
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Have you tried bringing a bigger weapon to brandish menacingly during your matches? I was losing a lot with a baseball bat, but once I brought the spiked flail things started improving for me.
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Oct 30, 2013 16:28
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Jack the Lad posted:The problem I have is I'm willing to put in the effort but it doesn't seem to really do anything. Even after I lose I can't really see why, unlike in (for example) Chess. I got up to about 12, 13 kyu or something and then it just seemed to stagnate. I'm pretty sure becoming better at tactics and reading would've helped a lot, maybe I should make another try.
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Oct 30, 2013 16:29
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Jack the Lad posted:The problem I have is I'm willing to put in the effort but it doesn't seem to really do anything. Even after I lose I can't really see why, unlike in (for example) Chess. Hop into the KGS room with the other goons, find someone who is willing to review your games with you. Alternatively, ask your opponents for a review of the game after you have played it. This will help a lot in understanding what it is that went wrong.
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Oct 30, 2013 18:15
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AwwJeah posted:Any good free iPhone Go apps that you guys know of? Got a long bus ride ahead of me and figured that learning how to play Go would be a good way to spend a few hours. I just purchased and tried out SmartGo for about an hour. It has a tutorial that introduces the basic concepts of the game and gives you puzzles to solve for each concept introduced. It worked well and I liked it. Now that I've tried playing, even just against AI on SmartGo, I can tell that there is a real learning curve to this game. Its fun so far, but I'm still a little lost. It started me out on a 9 x 9 board, so the games are short, but I'm still confused about what direction to take, especially in the early game.
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Oct 30, 2013 19:09
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Jack the Lad posted:I've read a bit about that, yeah, but the example shapes never seem to end up happening in actual games. I don't mean people are putting stones inside a connected group of my stones, but that they're putting stones in my "territory", often between my stones and the edge of the board, and even though they start out with 1 stone to my 3-6 in the area are able to either capture my stones or fill in a lot of the empty space and make it worthless. Get people to review your games, and specifically for this issue Do life and death problems. The point of them is basically to get you to figure out whether a group of your stones can be killed by your opponent or not, and what moves are good to play to keep you alive/kill their stones. There're a few sites online that have go problem collections. Basically your problem is that you're not "reading" the different possible moves from your move ("If I go here, he could go here, then I could go here or here, but if I go there, he can take this stone... But what if I went *there* instead of there?"), which is basically the thing that makes Go hard. I recommend checking out goproblems.com to get started, although it has issues because ugh user submitted content, and then maybe getting a free application like GoGrinder. and finding a collection of problems somebody's put together for it. I (and most of the other ITGO regulars) would be glad to talk to you about anything that's confusing you too, just hop onto KGS.
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Oct 30, 2013 19:18
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So I've been playing against the AI on an app, and I'm having a lot of trouble trying to predict my opponents next move, and planning out what I'm going to do. I've only played a few games, but I'm pretty lost already... I just played the game in the image, and I don't even really understand the scoring or how much I lost by...
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Oct 30, 2013 19:27
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Mego posted:So I've been playing against the AI on an app, and I'm having a lot of trouble trying to predict my opponents next move, and planning out what I'm going to do. I've only played a few games, but I'm pretty lost already... All of the white groups on the board except the top left are dead. This is because most of the white groups do not have two eyes (two discrete areas of territory that they surround). Without two eyes, eventually all of the white groups' liberties (empty points adjacent to the group) will be filled in by black stones and the white groups will be captured by black. White has almost no points. Focus on trying to make live groups by making at least two eyes. They don't have to be only one point each, but you either need two eyes or the ability to make two eyes no matter what your opponent plays to live. Edit: even the top left white group is dead, if it's black's turn. Edit again: actually I believe everything is dead. Clearly, I am not a go master haha DragQueenofAngmar fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Oct 30, 2013 |
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Oct 30, 2013 19:40
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The computers next moves are quite a bit more random, then a normal person's. One thing to remember is that all the scoring methods are just variants of the ancient method. Which is a bitch to count, but easy to explain. You just count the stones on the board. In your case all your stones are dead so your opponent wins by all the points. Dead means that if it wasn't a waste of time to play further black could kill you without a doubt.
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Oct 30, 2013 19:44
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Phyzzle posted:Has the Interactive Way to Go been posted? It's probably the best thing a beginner can read. I went through this last night, and I managed to follow through both it and the puzzles it presents. However, taking the lessons I learned there onto a blank board proved to be a bit of a step, although each game I play helps me a little more. If anyone is trying to learn to play and hasn't been to the website, I can't recommend it enough as a beginners tool.
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Oct 30, 2013 19:53
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Jack the Lad posted:I've read a bit about that, yeah, but the example shapes never seem to end up happening in actual games. I don't mean people are putting stones inside a connected group of my stones, but that they're putting stones in my "territory", often between my stones and the edge of the board, and even though they start out with 1 stone to my 3-6 in the area are able to either capture my stones or fill in a lot of the empty space and make it worthless. Close quarters action in go is a bit counter-intuitive in that it tends to settle positions quickly, a proposition that usually favors the underdog. It takes a lot more effort and preparation for you to kill a group of stones than for your opponent to get life for them. When your opponent plays stuff in "your territory," it just means that he thinks that there's enough room for him to squeeze in there and make life, but not so cramped that you can actually kill him. I suspect that the things you consider your territory really aren't, they're just areas of influence. The mechanism works kind of like this: you might have four stones in a formation, but by making contact with one or two of them, he can create a situation so locally urgent that your other stones don't matter. Good formations that take territory are much tighter than you'd think. Most popular formations (the ones you see in games, and are probably applying in your own) don't actually *take* territory... they anticipate the inevitable invasions and are built so that you have a good position afterward.
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Oct 30, 2013 20:01
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Under 15 posted:Close quarters action in go is a bit counter-intuitive in that it tends to settle positions quickly, a proposition that usually favors the underdog. It takes a lot more effort and preparation for you to kill a group of stones than for your opponent to get life for them. When your opponent plays stuff in "your territory," it just means that he thinks that there's enough room for him to squeeze in there and make life, but not so cramped that you can actually kill him. I suspect that the things you consider your territory really aren't, they're just areas of influence. This sounds smart/correct, but also on an entirely different level to where I'm at now in terms of understanding.
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Oct 30, 2013 20:28
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Jack the Lad posted:This sounds smart/correct, but also on an entirely different level to where I'm at now in terms of understanding. In beginner games it's common for players to divide the board approximately down the middle, or something similar. Eventually, the guy with the smaller half realizes he's about to lose if he ends the game, so he makes a bunch of speculative plays on his opponent's side and hope they gently caress up. Because of the mechanics of go, and the lack of skill of the players, this usually works, leaving the former 'winner' (you, in this case) feeling cheated. Your best remedy is to invade him back. As you and your opponents get better, these invasions will come earlier and earlier, until they blend into the early game and you're no longer dividing the board like that. A good rule of thumb in go is that if you stake out an area you can really only expect half of it to be yours by the end of the game. So, in an example where the players have cut the board neatly down the middle, roughly half of each area is going to be poked at, invaded, or otherwise ruined before scoring. This is very normal, and the better the players get, the lower the final scores on both sides tend to be.
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Oct 30, 2013 21:02
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Under 15 posted:In beginner games it's common for players to divide the board approximately down the middle, or something similar. Eventually, the guy with the smaller half realizes he's about to lose if he ends the game, so he makes a bunch of speculative plays on his opponent's side and hope they gently caress up. Because of the mechanics of go, and the lack of skill of the players, this usually works, leaving the former 'winner' (you, in this case) feeling cheated. Your best remedy is to invade him back. As you and your opponents get better, these invasions will come earlier and earlier, until they blend into the early game and you're no longer dividing the board like that. There's generally 2 ways of dealing with an opponent's territory. You can either reduce it (play moves at the border of his territory that eat into his space), or invade it (play moves directly in the heart of his territory, hoping that you can escape or live inside). Reducing is low risk/low reward, invading is high risk/high reward. So you generally invade when you're either too behind in the game and can't win by just reducing, or if you think the guy is being too greedy and claiming too much territory. Doing one of these usually prevents you from doing the other though, since in the process of defending against your reduce/invade his remaining territory will become solidified. This is kind of an abstract concept to beginners, and it will be frustrating at first because better players will get away with invasions they shouldn't be getting away with, and your own invasions will fail when they shouldn't, but it's something to keep in mind as you play more and get better 
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Oct 30, 2013 22:09
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A couple common mistakes beginners fall into are A) I must capture the enemy stones!, and B) this is MY territory! Capturing stones is actually a secondary goal of the game. What you should really be trying to do is place stones around the board with the hope of eventually securing those areas as territory, which is actually the main point of the game. It then follows that these "areas of influence" as they are called can eventually be secured into living groups, which is why everyone puts so much emphasis on studying life and death problems. As you play more games and you start grasping the depth of the game, the size of a 19x19 board actually starts to become much, much smaller, and it's easier to identify what a "good move" is when trying to secure influence/territory. As others have stated, what you think is your territory could very well disappear by a well played invasion. Just because you have stones loosely surrounding an area does not automatically mean that you own said area. This flows into another branch of Go study known as tesuji, of which there are various resources and books about. The word tesuji could be defined as "tactical ways of fighting to your advantage", and includes things like killing groups, invading areas to your advantage, etc. That all said, the final goal as a player is to reduce the enemy's territory while simultaneously expanding and/or strengthening your own. This is a concept a tad beyond the beginner level, but is eventually a higher level goal to work towards.
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Oct 31, 2013 01:01
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Even more generally, over the course of hundreds of moves, if all other moves are even, just one move that is one point better decides the game. If both players have good positions, for every move sequence one player plays, there should be some counter moves that are of equal valuation, at least. For players just starting out: if in the early game, your opponent attaches to his own stones multiple times in a row, just play somewhere else on the board away from the local situation. If he's dedicated to investing many moves in a very small part of the board then let him and take the spoils.
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Oct 31, 2013 01:11
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One thing that's helped me a little bit is to try and figure out when you're done working on an area (for now). For example:  It's blacks turn. I know what you want to do, you want to go to F1 and get those fuckin' stones. But you don't need to, they're already yours, you just haven't taken them yet. There's plenty of other stuff to do on the board early on. Edit: I didn't see this in the OP, but it's awesome: http://baduktopia.dtrinks.de/flash/English/1_Capturing_Method_Saving_Method_1.html Dr. Arbitrary fucked around with this message at 02:33 on Oct 31, 2013 |
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Oct 31, 2013 02:31
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I'm looking for an android go client that can do network or single play. Any recommendations?
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Oct 31, 2013 03:58
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Jack the Lad posted:I really hate this game. Like, it's genuinely the most frustrating board game I've ever played. I can understand why people hitting other people with Go boards is a whole genre of historical art. If he's straight up invading, and it worked, then you either A) didn't have enough there to prevent life, or B) just plain made too many wrong moves. This comes with time, just make sure all your stuff is connected, at least loosely, and if you smell an invasion drop something in there just to be safe; better to lose 1 point than 30. Of course this is all coming from a 13kyu and anyone better than me will have completely different advice...
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Oct 31, 2013 11:20
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I am not a book posted:I'm looking for an android go client that can do network or single play. Any recommendations? You can play against GnuGo (you shouldn`t), solve go-problems (do this, though gogrinder is a lot better for this), look at kogo's, and review games. There is a more modern clone (elygo) which also add IGS support, but that costs money and I haven't tried it yet. IGS seems to have quite a lot of apps supporting it, but I never tried them. KGS has an android app, but it is expensive and I haven't tried it. OGS' app broke with the last update, but a new one in announced. VictualSquid fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Nov 1, 2013 |
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Oct 31, 2013 11:38
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oiseaux morts 1994 posted:I would also say, play a 9x9 board rather than 19x19, because it's easier to get the hang of things. 9x9 is a great place to start, but keep in mind you are mostly only learning tactics that way, and not the "big picture" strategy that comes with a full-sized board. 13x13 games can be a lot of fun when you're learning too -- there's more room for whole-board development, but the games go faster and there's not the same overload of "oh poo poo where do I move?" that I think is pretty common among beginners playing on a full board. Incidentally, the reason the full board is 19x19 is because that ends up giving the best balance between edge territory and center territory. On smaller boards, there's not as much of a sense of a center game, while on boards larger than 19x19, the edges/corners are reduced in importance since there's so much real estate in the middle. Master posted:Questions for some of the go-people out there: 1) Based on the amount of games I've played, and time spent studying (reading books and doing go problems), I'm pretty bad at go. When I play regularly and stay in practice, I'm about 10k on kgs. When I don't play for a while I'm more like a 13-14k. 2) I've been playing off and on since the 90s. Took me probably a couple of months before I "got it" -- at the time, I didn't know about KGS, and the only experienced people I had to play with were on IGS (another server, one without much of a social/teaching community). I went to a go club and got a teaching game after I'd been playing for a couple of months and that was tremendously helpful -- having somebody explain basic opening moves (4-4 vs. knight enclosure, etc.) and stuff like how it's bad to play empty triangles. 3) (nothing to add here) 4) I have a moderately nice (2" Hiba) table board that I hardly ever get to use. I love the look & feel of it, but don't have any friends nearby who are near my strength. I do like the convenience of playing online (the automatic scorekeeping and game records), but miss the satifying clack of placing stones by hand. 5) Never really been a problem. I used to play some on a smaller beginner/travel board, and it was kind of delicate placing stones, but I don't remember any games getting outright disrupted as a result. On a full sized board using the proper grip, it works smoothly, and you can micro-adjust any stones that look a little wobbly.
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Oct 31, 2013 20:23
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tonberrytoby posted:WGoIgo is a pretty OK add supported general purpose android app. Do you mean GoIgo? I can find that, but I can't find anything titled wgoigo.
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Nov 1, 2013 01:36
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It's not too hard to keep the stones from sliding completely off their intersections if you're careful, but I have noticed that since I look at pieces perfectly centered in place on a computer screen or in a book most of the time, it can throw off my perception of what's going on if the pieces are just a bit off. Not to say that I ever really know what's going on anyway...
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Nov 1, 2013 01:40
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I am not a book posted:Do you mean GoIgo? I can find that, but I can't find anything titled wgoigo. I meant WeGoIgo: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=us.danlib.igo&hl=en
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Nov 1, 2013 02:12
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 07:29 |
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Flying-PCP posted:It's not too hard to keep the stones from sliding completely off their intersections if you're careful, but I have noticed that since I look at pieces perfectly centered in place on a computer screen or in a book most of the time, it can throw off my perception of what's going on if the pieces are just a bit off. Not to say that I ever really know what's going on anyway... If you've only ever played on screens, using an actual board will mess you up a little bit because of the foreshortening. Goes away after a few games, though.
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Nov 1, 2013 04:07
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