Helo, I´m a almost new player. I started to play en December and I´ve already played with IA Agapantus, Amarantus, Amybot begginer and Bergamota with some victories and some losses.
I want to play online with a player who help me learn no matter wich KYU or DAN he have, but be friendly to explain me a little.
You can use automatch finder to start games. Just go to the Play Go at online-go.com! | OGS Then select the board size. Then click big blue button “Play human” and wait for the beginning of the game!
I recommend to start playing at 9x9. But it is only my advise. Any other board size is ok.
And please do not play with bots. I’m worried that they won’t help you learn Go. They could even do the opposite.
As @NightSnare asks above, being a newbie I too would be very interested in the reasons why you believe that playing against bots could do the opposite of helping someone learn?
It was a personal advice. The experience with bot is different. I have a bias that the value of Go is a some kind of human to human communication, except for the pro players.
I have a different opinion regarding the presence of bots here. Their purpose mostly developers. Some kind of different contest among devs. It is only my opinion. It might be wrong.
Bots make mistakes humans don’t usually make. I don’t know much about GO AI but for chess they “know” all the right moves then randomly make bad moves. These don’t always make sense. Ie a bot could be closing a ladder then suddenly stop and you’re allowed to escape. Most rookies would kill that. Basically that’s all we see is groups to kill.. so with a low level bot you might see two perfect moves the an insane blunder whereas a player at your level will likely make alot of mediocre moves. As you get better your opponents get better so it scales.
Always playing the same bot is like always playing the same human. You learn to refute their mistakes, but the moves you learn may not work against other opponents.
When I was a beginner, I played against an app on my phone called “champion go”. It was set at level 1 (the lowest level). At some point I managed to win systematically by making a very big territory. Later I tried to do the same against humans and I always got invaded.
In my personal teaching experience, I met players who got stuck at a level because of bad learning from the bot. I remember a 10k who was always insisting on some not working sequences because he learned that the bot was doing the same, expecting a failure from an opponent. That was completely wrong and that was an habit very difficult to get rid of. Just an example.