Ask Go players about Go (come play Go with us)

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Azazel: Jun 6, 2001; I bitch slap for a living - you want some?

Hey guys. I play as 'bojo' on KGS, been awhile since I've stopped into the KGS room. I'll pop in there from now on, now that I'm actively playing again.

Slightly related, but there was an article about me in the Kyoto Newspaper here a couple weeks ago. Been playing at a local club in the next town over with a bunch of 70+ year old guys. They peg me as a 2d-3d, but I blame that on localized rank inflation. They don't believe me when I say I am only 4k on the internet.

Because of the article I've also gotten invited to play at people's houses too. One guy had an $8k (USD) board with a Meijin sig on the bottom, and showed me his 4d Nihon Ki-in certificate from 1973 (had Kitani's sig on it). Then his buddy came over and we played a game, then later that week gave me a spare folding board, bowls, and stones he had lying around.

My rough translation (it's not perfect, and a couple mistakes):

quote:

"Western Male, Plays Go" (top title) - "Kyotamba Jr High ALT" (side
title) - "Carries a Dan level rank" (middle blurb) - "The member
placing the stone on the Go board is Brian (Nantan City Sonobe Town *
Nantan City Sonobe Town Go club)" (picture blurb)

"Within the town of Kyotamba, the ALT who works at Mizuho and Komono
Jr High Brian Jones age 29, plays Go at the Nantan City Sonobe Town Go
Club. Brian found the game of Go through the internet while living in
America, and is within the Dan level ranks.

Brian comes from the State of Alaska, in America, where you can see
the aurora. His family had many Japanese friends in the past, and
therefore he became interested in Japanese culture. When he was 23,
he found Go, and things like play Go on the internet with people
around the world, make a local Go club, etc. In 2006 he exchanged to
Hokkaido University, and from August of last year started working in
Kyotamba's Jr High's as an ALT.

A member at his Jr High told him about the Go club, and from May he
began visiting it. He plays Go with the various members of the club,
etc (not sure what it says here). Some 75 old guy who's name I can't
read gets introduced, and says 'Brian is about 2-dan to 3-dan in
level. He's become considerably strong because he plays on the
internet.'

Brian, who also rides his mountain bike up mountains on weekends,
interestingly says 'You can feel the emotions of your opponent when
you play Go.' He also says, 'It's a game where White and Black play
stones, and compete for territory.'"

# ¿ Jul 17, 2008 12:40

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 15:52

Azazel: Jun 6, 2001; I bitch slap for a living - you want some?

Under 15 posted:

I'll hazard a guess and say I get to 8k before I brick wall

If you have passed the 15k-12k brick wall already, yeah that's about where the next brick wall is.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2008 18:21

Azazel: Jun 6, 2001; I bitch slap for a living - you want some?

I have created Go as MIDI! :eng101:

This is what the 33rd Meijin title pro game between Cho U and Iyama Yuta sounds like: sound-go-test1.mp3

# ¿ Mar 1, 2009 23:24

Azazel: Jun 6, 2001; I bitch slap for a living - you want some?

Blendy posted:

So I'm looking to get a copy of Attack and Defense and I was just checking amazon to see had any copies (which I don't know why I did, they never do). Three sellers however had copies. Have you seen what they are charging?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/4871870146/ref=dp_olp_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1242014363&sr=8-1&condition=all

I had an original copy of that. Lent it out to friends, pages got torn out from the poor binding, and all I can remember is wanting that entire book back because I am 100% positive it explained everything I am currently lacking.

# ¿ May 12, 2009 12:54

Azazel: Jun 6, 2001; I bitch slap for a living - you want some?

Just got back to my hometown here in Japan after spending the last 3 days in Shizuoka (near Nagoya) at the World Amatuer Go Championship. Wasn't entirely what I expected, but met a lot of great people and saw some really good games. Turns out the little Go circle I play in is connected to a handful of people in the Japan Go world and beyond, so I ended up getting interviewed, met a handful of pros, and had a chance to play games with some of the people there.

I completely forget to bring my camera, but I will post up some pictures my older friend took once she sends them my way.

There's a little bit of news about it at http://usgo.org for the curious.

# ¿ May 31, 2009 13:19

Azazel: Jun 6, 2001; I bitch slap for a living - you want some?

McNerd posted:

Go tournaments are played with handicaps?

There's a yearly tournament I've played at twice here in Japan, with over 100 players attending (mostly ancient Japanese dudes). It seemed the C class (kyu players) had a lot of handicap games. The B class (1-2 dan) was strictly even, and the majority of people there played at that level. The A class (3dan+) had one or two handicap games, but only because there were a couple exceptionally strong people.

I registered into the B class both years (3kyu on KGS), and did 50/50 both times. The first year I won my first two games, lost the next game by making a ladder (lol), lost the game after that in frustration, and pulled it together and won the last. This last year I went 2-3, but only because the final game was a damned jigo, and in the case of a jigo white takes the win.

# ¿ Oct 20, 2009 06:16

Azazel: Jun 6, 2001; I bitch slap for a living - you want some?

oiseaux morts 1994 posted:

close thread. kgs cannot compete

I actually contacted these guys and inquired about doing server scaling / development with them the other day. They're open sourcing pieces of it as they are deemed stable, which is a huge step up from wms and his lovely closed source java system. It'd be nice to have an extensible API to work off of and play with, but I wonder if it'll ever reach the numbers KGS has.

# ¿ Jan 28, 2012 12:49

Azazel: Jun 6, 2001; I bitch slap for a living - you want some?

oiseaux morts 1994 posted:

They will need support and funding in order to scale up the servers (to handle the influx) when they open after beta. If they can support lots of users, it will be a hit.

This is along the lines of what I talked to them about. Even if the service peaked at over 25k total users there's not much behind scaling the servers. The backend runs Node.js on top of Redis (Juggernaut), and does message passing to the browser via socket.io. I've played with this tech a bit and am pretty sure they won't get crushed by an insane amount of users. The technology definitely scales easily enough, it's not much effort to drop a new web/app/db server in.

As for funding, they've already raised $8k USD which covers costs for a simple server cluster on any service (Amazon, Rackspace) for a few years, and I imagine donations vs. costs will even out if they become remotely popular. Their actual goal is to turn this into a full time job, but I'm somewhat skeptical unless another phenomenon like HIkaru no Go comes along and boosts Go's popularity again.

# ¿ Jan 29, 2012 14:49

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 15:52

Azazel: Jun 6, 2001; I bitch slap for a living - you want some?

lemonslol posted:

yeah my university is <20,000 students. So I'm pretty sure we will get 10 people tops + the 4 it takes to start the club. But it will be nice playing a game in real life with people my skill level I just worry it will be hard to level up if I can't play stronger players

I setup and ran a Go club in Fairbanks, Alaska for a couple years. We were just a bunch of low level friends trying to find more people who played, and ended up attracting a strong 1kyu CS professor, an insanely strong ~6dan Chinese research professor came a few times, and two judges from the court house (not strong, but interesting people) played weekly.

Everyone in your group will naturally get stronger (especially if they pick up somes books and play online), and you might even have a few players get overly passionate about it and reach 1dan in under a year. One of the bigger good points is that you learn a lot yourself when you teach other people (like learning how to play decent handicap games, understanding core tesuji and joseki better yourself, etc.).

Try it out and see how it goes.

# ¿ Sep 13, 2012 03:50

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