First go game

Dont quite understand the rules of go, we watched a lot if videos and non of them are very comprehensive. Any recommendations for learning

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While you’re learning the basics, it might be easier to play on 9x9. If that’s the only board you have, you can use sticks or pens or anything straight to lay on the board and mark out a 9x9 grid in the centre. It makes games faster to finish so you can test whether ideas work or not.

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Okay thank you, for creating a “border” around your territory will it count if the stones are adjacent and not perpendicular? And do you notice anything wrong that we did or did not

All of your stones appear to be legal moves, so that’s a great start! Now it’s just the infinite pursuit of stone efficiency :sweat_smile:

Diagonal connections can count for creating the border, but note borders need to be complete. If there is a direct adjacent path from a black stone to a white stone, that whole area technically doesn’t count, unless both players agree all the stones of one colour are “dead”.

I wouldn’t worry too much about scoring while you’re still figuring out the basics, but for beginners I would consider the black and white dots more or less settled, and suggest the red dot areas might want some more play (some areas more than others)

I marked the bottom left as all blacks since you both ended the game, but white has a lot of potential in that corner should they choose to keep playing moves there.

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You might find some of the resources in this doc helpful :slightly_smiling_face:

I think it’s a bit old now so some of the links within may not work, but hopefully enough do

I can relate much to the ‘not understanding the rules’ part. Everyone always says how easy the rules of Go are, and perhaps they are easy, but yet it seems to be a hard game for beginners.
I had big problems when I started, I think its generally a little hussle to learn Go when you dont have someone explaining it for you in person.

The biggest adivse I can give to anyone new is to keep playing! And to not look much on the results. The adventage of playing online is, usually the server doesnt let you place ilegal stones and therefore doesnt let you make bad ‘ilegal’ habits.
It is defenitely not a shame to look at the rules over and over again, also to look at the ogs how to play: Play Go at online-go.com! | OGS
Personally I still couldnt understand a few of the problems asked there for a while, so I hope I can generalize that this is totally normal and nothing bad. There are a few tricky problems!

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IME the biggest difficulty of the game is not the rules (as in the game mechanics), although it does take some practice to recognise when stones are captured, and capturing without liberties can also be counter-intuitive to beginners.

The more difficult part is finishing the game when there is no experienced player/teacher around to help out. It often happens that beginners end the game prematurely (i.e. before all groups and territories are settled), try to score a very ambiguous position and end up confused.

It’s difficult to learn go completely on your own. If you have nobody around to help you to finish the game, I recommend to just keep playing until it’s 100% clear to you and your opponent which regions are owned by which player before you stop and score the game.

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There is actually a theory about ancient Go practice which it works differently than our current capturing rules (based on the relic variant like the Tibetan Go where “hot capture” cannot be placed immediately), where capturing literally works between “turn”. That is each side plays a move in “one turn”, and the counting of liberties happened after both had placed their stones. This makes it physically impossible to immediately recapture (hot capture cannot be placed), and makes techniques like snapback work differently (it can work, but the opponent gets the option to connect before being recaptured). This would also help explain how ko rule wasn’t necessary at the beginning, since literally it is impossible for the opponent to take back and has to play somewhere else (this also might explain why ancient records always talked about total turns that both have to play, instead of number of moves)

For our modern capturing rules, we basically have 3 steps per move, play the stone of one color, check the opponent’s stones’ liberties, and then check the current player’s stones’ liberties. Where in ancient times, the sequence might be both play a stone, the first player checks for the second player’s stones’ liberties, and then the second player checks the first player’s stones’ liberties.

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If you prefer video form, I would suggest this playlist from Go Magic:

afterwards giving a look at Nick Sibicky’s channel is a good idea since he has the most lectures on teaching new players:

If you prefer books, the best beginner series imho is Janice Kim’s “Learn to play Go”:

https://www.amazon.com/Learn-Play-Go-Masters-Ultimate/dp/1453632891

It is 5 books, but are all worth it. If you read them and follow some of the examples along on your real board you will be a very strong beginner by the end of those books (around 12k in Go rankings - or around 1000 Elo in chess terms).

If you want something free, I suggest you begin with “81 little lions” which you can find here in a few languages:

Then you can try this, also for free (and also available for various languages and present in the above list):

Finally another place to have a look, other than OGS resources, could be this:

Good luck and enjoy the game :slight_smile:

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Another suggestion is to watch some stronger players (let say Dan players to make your choice easiest) games.
Chose some going to final counting. Watch them quickly not trying to understand what is happening but more how the games proceed: going from the corners to the center, delimiting territories and finally closing the last doors.

There are thousands of games here in full free access.

If you really want to understand what is happening it’s like impossible and you re going to lose your time but ok, as a tiny help it is all about threat to be captured, and using it to make sure points.

Have fun.

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If you’re confused about how to score a game, you could try stone scoring. Whoever has more stones on the board wins. It’s a bit cumbersome, because games become longer (especially on large boards). But I think it should help understand how the game works normally.

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