How to improve in go?

Hello everyone myself sai an high school student interested in playing go. I came to know this game exist after searching about games in internet I am completely new to this game so please advice me where should I start learning?

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First: https://www.learn-go.net/

Second: https://online-go.com/learn-to-play-go

Third: http://playgo.to/iwtg/en/

Then, play a lot of 9x9 games against human players. Once you feel comfortable with life and death and knowing who is winning before the game is over, move to 19x19.

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https://online-go.com/learn-to-play-go also u should do some beginner puzzles first i(press the puzzle button).Also u can learn some joseki later at. https://online-go.com/joseki

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Don’t learn too much, get the rules and play as soon as possible. Playing is most of the fun. Playing will make you understand most what you need to know and if you try to not make twice the same failures, you will soon be no more a beginner.

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“Lose your first fifty games as quickly as possible” - Lots of people

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https://tsumegohero.com/sets

Do the first three sets: Easy Capture, Easy Life, Easy Kill.

These are the most basic tsumego sets I know of, and you don’t need any playing experience or prior knowledge.

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There are a lot of resources for beginners that were developed by OGS forum participants. I would definitely scan this thread, and see what clicks for you:

If you look under the OGS Forum Article Tutorials heading, you’ll see a link to

tonybe’s 19x19 FOR BEGINNERS SERIES

I wrote those 4 articles specifically thinking about what I wish I’d known when I was just starting to play, so those might be helpful.

Good luck!

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Better not start before you go to college as playing Go is really time–consuming, and once you fall in love with it, It’s almost unlikely to stop.

Go has very simple rules but extremely complicated variations. On the way of improving in Go,you need to get a book(or e–book)first to learn basic skills, then spend time playing and practice “eating” stones, and do some simple practice about lives and deaths. You may try repeating games you have played to see if you really understand the moves of yourself and your opponent. You can also play by yourself when you cannot find others to play with you.

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Can I start playing with computer for practicing the game?

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It’s much better to play with humans as bots, especially weaker ones, play very unnatural moves which will not prepare you to play humans. There are people at every skill level here on OGS, so just send an open challenge or accept one.

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To be fair, weak humans also play many bad moves. How “natural” those moves are is, perhaps, subjective… is it “natural” to make bad shapes with liberty issues, for instance?

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Definitely, but when you play different people they will make different bad moves. If you play the same bad AI aver and over again, the bad moves will be the same over and over again.

Having said that, I don’t think it’s that bad to play AIs (of whatever level) for a while. Just don’t stick to it for long. Personally I started playing against some weak AI in the 80s until I could reliably spot atari and had some basic understanding of 2 eyes.

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when you play different people they will make different bad moves. If you play the same bad AI aver and over again, the bad moves will be the same over and over again.

Excellent point.

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I guess it depends on what your goals are. Do you want to get better at playing against bots, or do you want to get better at playing against real live people? If you want to get better at playing against humans, start playing against humans as soon as possible.

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I want to get better at both playing against bots and playing against humans.

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Just play whoever you feel comfortable with, it’s a game, you decide what you want to do. :slight_smile:

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sure,of course.

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I was also shy to play humans when I first started, because

  • I didn’t want anybody to see how bad I was
  • I thought that if they knew what they were doing and I didn’t that I would somehow be “wasting their time”
  • it felt like a lot more pressure because if I made mistakes I couldn’t “undo” them and try something else
  • I just wanted to experiment and figure things out - I wasn’t ready to show my incompetence to the world.

For better of worse, I spent most of my first year playing games against this AI called GnuGo:

https://www.gnu.org/software/gnugo/

This AI has settings which will take it from a ~15-17kyu at the weakest to about 8kyu at the strongest setting. I would definitely start with the weakest :wink:

It was helpful in that it allowed me to try a lot of different things, and begin to understand what I was doing. So much of learning Go involves absorbing what is POSSIBLE and what is IMPOSSIBLE, and GnuGo was a nice safe, comforting place to start. If something didn’t work, I could undo the last 20 moves and try something else.

The problem was - even at its weakest setting - GnuGo never made any obvious mistakes: it always made good shape, attended to the proper priorities at each stage of the game, and made good use of direction of play.

If I had been playing other humans who understood Go as poorly as I did, I would at least have been able to learn how to profit from their mistakes!

So yes, if you just want the freedom to experiment, feel free to try and play against bots. However, I strongly urge you to try playing against humans who are also beginners (anywhere between 20-25 kyu) because they will play a lot more BAD MOVES and allow you a completely different type of learning than someone who never makes mistakes, but only plays too cautiously.

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thanks for sharing

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