If you had $1,000 for the Go community

General Go Discussion
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@Clossius1

If you had $1,000 for the Go community, what would you spend it on?

Aggressive marketing. Here is my idea:
You get your best younger player and you advertise “win 1000 dollars by winning at Go against this kid. You have 1 week. Your time starts NOW” you know Taskmaster style … that would get people talking about the local Go club, for sure … plus you won’t lose any money, cause noone can learn to play Go and win in a week :wink:

So, you’ll still have money to run this scheme for next month too. Neat huh? :stuck_out_tongue:

@Gia

and we end up with lots of dreaming and no doing.

It is the good old clash of world-views. The “all or nothing” people vs the “whatever-it-is-good-enough” kind of fellows. Both ideas have their merits, though.

@Cchristina

Go players try too much to imitate Chess players.
It makes me want to learn to play Chess instead.

It is a good thing then that they are such different games :slight_smile:
A good thing that could be marketed is how different and, in a sense, easier, Go is to have fun while being in a meaningful ranking.

I used to be good at chess when I was a kid, but never studied for it (chess needs a LOT of memorization, which I despise), but what was good for my place, was really nothing against a player of mediocre elo of 1200 with basic memorization skills and formal openings.
To even hold a 1200 elo rank in chess needs books upon books of reading and learning.
Not so much in Go, apparently, if that link is to be believed, because 1200 elo in Go is practically 10k, which a kid can reach with minimal studying, in comparison to chess.

So, if anything, sometimes we should aim for the differences.

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But without that information, we can still dream! :star_struck:

If I had £1,000 to spend on the Go community, I would:

  • Put it together with our meagre club budget and use the fact that we already have some funding from multiple sources to apply for more money from the university, BGA, arts council, etc. for the project described below :money_mouth_face: :money_with_wings: :moneybag:

  • First, buy some wooden boards and maybe wooden bowls too to go with the many sets of stones our club has already. The boards (and bowls if included) could be second-hand, subsidised by the BGA, home-made, etc. to keep costs down.

  • Buy a massive festival tent, something like this:

Screenshot_20211009-113953
Screenshot_20211009-113953720×675 447 KB

Again, second-hand to keep costs down. This one is on eBay for £290 incl. P&P and is new actually.

  • Buy some nice mats, big floor cushions, little tables, Chinese / Japanese / Korean style wall hangings, etc. to decorate the inside (and outside) of the tent into a zen Go dojo :pray::shinto_shrine:

  • Tour this set up around family / arts / science / games festivals, village fairs, schools, etc. to share the joy of Go with as many people as possible :sunglasses:

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Cool idea :heart:

You’d need quite a big car/truck however :grimacing:

Let me know when (not “if” :grin: !) you plan to tour Germany—I might want to join! (No truck though, and only a tiny car.)

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I had no idea about the amount of studying effort to hold even that sort of intermediate rating in chess. I think there are quite a few go players who got to low dan (comparable to ~2000 Elo in chess?) in maybe 5 years with basically no study at all, only playing a lot and some reviewing (mostly with their opponents) and some tutoring by stronger club members.

Edit: I’m not trying to put down the majority of players who don’t reach low dan in 5 years. I’m merely pointing out that if you are blessed with having a good mental “click” for the game of go, you don’t need to study much to reach a fairly strong level.

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Exactly. :slight_smile:
But in chess that is quite impossible, in my best of knowledge, because there is an array of openings and attacks and counter-attacks that need to be learned and memorised. With the board being smaller and the pieces having different movements and more restrictions (since all of the pieces begin on the board), this means that most openings have been already played and the bad ones have long since been discarded (especially since they have had computers beating pros for many years before Go had the same treatment).

I remember playing 15 games against someone that had claimed to have studied books on chess and I won most of the games, to his horror (last game he threw the board on the ground … maybe I shouldn’t have taunted him too much by constantly reminding him that I didn’t know any chess :rofl:) … however when I played with someone that was actually ranked (I think he was around 1300 elo at the time - the equivalent of 7-8 kyu in Go) he totally destroyed me four games in a row within half an hour, as he said, with some “very basic and standard attacks - it wasn’t even funny because you didn’t know the appropriate responses” …
I was not a chess “newbie” … I had played way more than 3000 games of it when I was young and all the experience really wouldn’t even put me in 800+ elo since I lacked the opening memorizations. However with 3000+ Go games at a young age, I’d probably be in the dan ranks.

Go openings can have complex joseki, but the difference with chess is that the opponent - if not confident about playing Taisha or the magic sword of Muramasha - can indeed avoid the complicated variations and play simply. In chess if you do not know the opening, you are automatically shark-bait.

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Interesting. But I’m not sure if this is a pro or con for go.

At least in chess, you have this option of study grinding to improve, even if the game doesn’t really “click” for you.

In go, many people who are prepared to make such an effort, still end up being stuck somewhere around 13k or 7k or some other plateau, because the option of study grinding your way up is not working as well as in chess. Yes, you can do tsumego (and that is usually the advice these players get) but that only brings you so far.

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Well, most people find it difficult to grind on any game that doesn’t click for them. Most will take the effort for school lessons or college and buckle up and study for a lesson they do not like, but I do not think that a lot of people study hobbies that they do not really really enjoy/like.

In go, many people who are prepared to make such an effort, still end up being stuck somewhere around 13k or 7k or some other plateau,

True, but that is something we are doing wrong, generally thinking those ranks to be “low” when, in fact, if we were to translate them to elo and have them compared with other games, they are VERY decent indeed.

I’d be very proud to be able say that I am 1100 elo in chess, however a 10k Go player is usually like “oh, God, I suck, I cannot even reach SDK” … the different style of ranking than the one we are used to in the west, has really created a “bad reputation” for some ranks, that really shouldn’t have it. And since ranking is something that a lot of people think is important, maybe we should re-consider about how we market those ranks :slight_smile:

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Indeed I consider 10k a decent player. In (Dutch) chess terms, “club” level.

Maybe this phenomenon of putting down players of say DDK level (by themselves or by others) is something that happens more online? I don’t remember it being such an issue offline (though maybe it spread from online to offline in recent years).

I don’t think that renaming different classes of players would really work. I’ve seen many cases where things with a “bad” reputation were renamed in an attempt to lose that reputation. But IME that works only temporarily, if at all.

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Well, sometimes that does work, but I was not proposing that. I was only talking about having a more positive attitude about ranking in general.

Personally I like the humble attitude that a lot of Go rankers have, saying that them being a dan level player is not much of an accomplishment because there are 6 year-olds in Asia that are already better than them, but that can give the idea to DDK players that their rank is totally negligible, while in truth if it was applied to another board game, it would have been quite the accompishment. :slight_smile:

I hadn’t noticed that either till yesterday to be honest, but I think that it would be a nice thing to point out at people that get frustrated by their ranks.

As you say this may be a more online issue, but during those two years with all the restrictions, online gaming is what most people have as an only option.

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Quiz: If a swimming association comes to me with this pitch: “2nd-level swimmers in 100m butterfly are equal to 3.13a free solo climber like so and so and the one in this movie and the kid that got the TikTok top ten”, what sport do you think I’d take?

Please do.
With or without the Zen tent.

My point exactly :unamused:

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Oh, believe me, I do already :wink: But the tent would be cool though, right? :sunglasses:

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Beautiful plans.
Maybe do some crowdfunding to carry them out?

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I’d show some mercy and buy two eyes for @BHydden’s dead dragon :sunglasses: :fire:

(Just kidding, sabaki skills are not for sale…)

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Our completed game had no dead dragons. Our current game is too early to have any dragons. Quite sure I don’t know what you’re talking about :sunglasses:

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…yet :smiling_imp:

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One silly idea that occurred to me.

While there’s plenty of things one could do, plenty of good suggestions of above, books equipment tournament sponsors etc.

One could also consider trying to grow the community, and one possibly reasonable way these days (looking at how popular chess streams and YouTube channels are) might be to sponsor a few big streamers to do a stream where they learn to play go.

I’m not sure one would want to pay really top tier streamers necessarily since I wouldn’t know the scale of what they charge. That said, there probably are many streamers that would’ve done a chess stream in the past, or maybe the sizeable chess stream that might play Go for a bit. I mean plenty of streamers will do sponsored streams on random games like World of tanks or random apps (some viking or city building etc type app).

A key difference of course to paid streams for apps would be that those kinds of apps/games want more people to make more in game purchases etc. The Go community likely just wants more people for the sake of it, not necessarily to gain some subscribers to a particular otherwise free to play server.

It might seem like an odd suggestion, but it maybe isn’t all bad?

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Maybe pay some influencers to promote Go on Instagram?

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Twitch is better than IG IMO

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1000 is nothing for advertising

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I have to disagree with you here (Disclaimer: I have not read the whole thread yet).

Sure in chess the tree of variations starts out much smaller than in go, so it is easier to memorise some openings for the first four or so moves, depending on how much preparation you’re willing to do. However the number of variations quickly grow to a size where the difference between go and chess is irrelevant. In go and chess there always comes a point where both players stare at a completely new position they have never seen before.
That many chess players memorize hundreds of opening variations is purely speculation, and saying you have to is wrong. Moreover go is no different in this aspect:

Go players studying joseki <=> Chess players studying openings

Anyway in my opinion a general understanding of good / bad moves and a healthy playing style is more important than studying fixed pattern, both in go and chess.

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