Hello, I am United Go 24kyu and I am looking for a Dan Level teacher. I am 16 and hope to become a pro player in japan or Korea, but when I look at how to become a insei the age limit is 25. So, I need to improve a lot. It’s discouraging especially when most people in those countries turn pro at my age, but I will prevail. So if there is someone willing to sit down with me once a day and help me study I would be grateful.
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The ambition is commendable and I do wish you the best on your road towards becoming a stronger Go player. As with all ambitions, it is important to keep the realistic limitations in mind so we know how to approach that goal in the most effective way.
It is a demanding commitment for any person to commit time to teaching Go every day, especially if this commitment has no monetary reward. Normally, serious teachers ask for a fee for each game / hour / session they spend with you. You can find many strong Go instructors who are willing to take students online at a cost of 10 - 45 USD per hour / game on (usually) a weekly basis.
Some of these teachers include (but are not limited to):
- Shawn Ray (Clossius): http://www.shawnsgogroup.com/lessons.html
- The OGS user krnzmb, who is a strong 6 dan on this site: https://online-go.com/player/192100/
- BenKyo Go Tutoring: https://online-go.com/player/111091/
- Ten, a 1p Finnish professional at Nihon Kiin: https://online-go.com/player/472/
- Cornel Burzo, a Romanian amateur 7D: http://www.golessons.com/
There are also online Go schools that provide very enlightening lectures and league games, there are two online as far as my knowledge goes. These Go schools require a monthly / annual / seasonal subscription:
- Yangusang Dojang, run by In-Seong Hwang, European amateur 8 dan: http://www.yunguseng.com/
- Guo Juan’s Internet Go School, she is a Chinese 5p professional: https://internetgoschool.com/index.vhtml
That being said, as a 24 kyu there is no rush to pay for online tutors yet. I recommend finding yourself a formal tutor once you have reached kyu ranks in the single digits. There are abundant online resources to help you understand the basics of the game – enough to take you up to 9 kyu at least.
Finally, OGS forums house a friendly community of passionate players, though not many (as far as I am aware of) are offering teaching games at the dan level, some strong kyus (1 kyu - 5 kyu) are more than happy to offer teaching games to double digit kyu players. I believe there are also some strong double digit kyu players here who are offering teaching games to those who are few stones weaker than themselves. For a detailed list, have a look over the Teaching Games section of the forums, and scan for those who are offering them. At this stage, I don’t think you’ll benefit more from a dan level teacher than you will from any stronger kyu player: they’ll all be teaching you the basics!
Good luck!
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In addition to Issho’s great advice, somebody probably needs to break it to you that at 24k you do not need a Dan level teacher.
You have got so much to learn before you will even understand what a Dan level teacher has to teach.
The fantastic youtube teachers dwyrin and Nick Sibicky refer to anyone below 10k as “DDK”. They literally can’t distinguish between people who are so far below them: 11k and 24k is the same to them. Yet an 11k player is a God to a 24k player. And an 11k teacher much more recent experience of the challenges of the first Go hurdles.
So the good news is there’s much more scope for finding a teacher for the basics than waiting to find (or paying) a Dan. There are heaps of SDKs here who will respond to a “teaching game please” post, and are wonderfully generous with their time and advice.
GaJ
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On a sidenote. EGF started professional system recently and we already have few 1p players in europe. I don’t believe there is an age limit but I might be mistaken.
I think it is important to manage your expectations. For top go players, starting age of 8-10 is allready considered to be quite late-ish. Not trying to dissueade you per se. Just saying that children have this awesome neurplasticity that rewires their brains to do anything they try very efficiently. Might be very hard to catch up with that.
If you are 24k, go is very new to you. Initial fascination might pass and you might find some pitfalls you did not expect. I know guy who is stuck at 8k level for 10+ years.
That being said I am not dissuading anyone from pursuing dreams. Jsut saying that you should be careful about what you expect…
Also what GreenAsJade said. At that level I think it is a safe bet you have little to no understanding of essential concepts. Reading any introductory go book like the Cho Chikun’s “Go: A Complete Introduction to the Game” will do you a huge service for your money 
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Are you saying 11 is too late to be pro? I am also 24k but I am 11 and want to one day go pro.[quote=“Pond_Turtle, post:4, topic:12298”]
For top go players, starting age of 8-10 is allready considered to be quite late-ish.
[/quote]
It is only an observed trend, not a rule. Though you do remind me of my younger self.
When I was your age a few years ago, I got into programming out of interest. It was an enlightenment when everything began to make sense for me, and I soon began setting out to achieve the holy grail of game making: a game that would simulate life in its entirety in a digital universe.
As months passed by, the game idea never came into fruition. Prototypes were made, but progress was slow. It wasn’t until a year and a half later did I realize that I asked for too much too quickly. By then I was more proficient with programming, and I know better. The game idea remained just an idea, and I have since moved on.
While I would love to be encouraging, the last thing I want is for those I encourage to look at their dreams through a rose-tainted window. There is a well known psychological effect called the Dunning-Krugar effect.
Pictures say a thousand words:
People who are new to any field tend to have over inflated assessments of skill. That was where I was at when I started programming. Now I am on the slow and steady slope to confidence, after many years of perseverance.
You may want to be professional now, but you might think otherwise as you play the game more. Maybe you will be like me, and laugh off the ambition as if it was a childish dream after a year or two.
Or perhaps you won’t, and persist your way to the world stage.
That is why children are so full of potential!
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Thank you.
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I do not understand your graff. Can you tell me what it means?
I can play with u . 10k real life .
I am new to go, but I would like to play you sometime. Most of my games end with timeout or cancellation. Some of it is my fault for thinking that some games paused on weekends and I counted a Monday as a weekend since for school it is a long weekend. But I do not understand cancelation or game annulled.
Sure that would be cool.
Thanks for the reply. I actually meant to take out that part about the teacher being dan. I understand what you mean about the commitment.
I already have that book and all the Janice Kim’s’ series and a book about opening theory. I just have to work through them and apply what I learn. Thank you.
I would be willing to play teaching games with you daily for a limited time, without charge. We would need to meet on OGS and agree on a daily time. My goal would be to give you a strong understanding of the basic local and global strategies, and I would start on a 9x9 board. I would end up teaching you how to review your own games, so you can learn from your own mistakes. I have some experience teaching beginners. My rank is about 15 kyu. If interested, contact me.
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Hello UnitedGo
Let me share some stories from my experience. I learned the rules of Go about 10 years ago, but didn’t really start playing and leveling up until I watched the AlphaGo/Lee Sedol games in March of 2016.
Since then, I’ve climbed up from 24kyu to somewhere between 15-18 kyu. It has take a lot of practice, and study, and I feel like I’ve learned a lot - but mostly I’ve grown to appreciate just how much I still have to learn just to get to 10kyu, and then to 5 and 1 kyu.
It’s not just a matter of raw intelligence, or fighting spirit, or the patience and hard work it takes to level up - it’s a matter of accumulated experience. They say “lose your first 100 games quickly” - and that’s good advice. But that same advice applies for your next 1000 games and your next 10,000 games as well. You cannot predict what you will learn as you climb all those stairs, but there is no shortcut. You really need to climb and keep climbing if you want to level up like that.
Here are some other tips from things that have helped me:
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Play as many people as you can: it can be hard to find open games when you’re 24k, because so many players here have a cut off, but just keep putting game requests out there. Maybe find some other beginning players and send them a courteous challenge request. There are SO many levels of Go that it’s important to start at your level and learn the important lessons there before you can build on that foundation. Play as many games with 18-24kuy players as you can until you start getting the basics down (i.e. playing a balanced opening, learning when to tenuki, learning when a group of stones is “settled”, capturing races, how to invade, etc).
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Find your speed: some people do really well playing fast games, and playing from their gut. Other people like having the time to play out a bunch of variations in analyze mode, reading ahead to avoid pitfalls, and playing slow deliberate correspondence games. Try everything and see what works for you, and then focus on it. Don’t feel bad if you’re not good at fast games right now. That will come later. Just focus on building the fundamentals.
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Balance variety with consistency: if you are lucky, you will find an opponent out on the server who is somewhat close to your level, and is an entertaining enough opponent that you enjoy coming back and playing with that person over and over. As you both level up, you can have meaningful strategy discussions while you are playing, and learn from your successes AND your mistakes.
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Learn from watching better players: a great way to learn is to watch the games of more advanced players, either live, or replaying their moves at your own speed. Find an interesting game on the live games page, and then click on that user to review their previous games. Find a finished game that ended with a close score (like white wins by 6.5 points, etc) and then play through that game move by move. At each move, ask yourself “what would MY next move be?” Does the player go to the same place? If they make a different move - WHY did they do that? What was their strategy?
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Play against machines: I know some people discourage learning from playing computer opponents, but I found it really useful in terms of trying out different tactics. It’s also good to LEARN from your computer opponent because they’re usually much more careful and don’t make the same mistakes that beginner Go players make. If you want to try a nice free one, there’s always Panda glGo, which comes with a GnuGo AI rated at between 15-18kyu (https://www.pandanet.co.jp/English/glgo/).
Once you’ve got that under your belt, you can also try this one: Royal Leela: https://www.sjeng.org/leela.html
This is an AI program who is another user on here, so you can see her playing games live: https://online-go.com/player/419331/
You can also download the very powerful AI to your computer (she’s rated 4 dan out of the box - the one on the GS server has leveled up to a 5 dan by playing over time), and either watch it play itself, or play against it. The nice thing is - because it’s a deep-learning based algorithm, it has an option where it shows you a heatmap of the best moves available based on previous experience. This is probably the closest that a beginner will come to trying to understand how a dan-level player sees the board. It can be daunting and discouraging at first, because a dan player takes SO many more risks, and then sticks the landing on each of them. But over time, you can start seeing the strategies behind those risks, and applying those same themes to your own games.
Good luck on your journey, be patient, and remember that every mistake is an opportunity to learn something new.
Tony B
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That would be very nice
Thank you for the advice. Are you talking about the program Leela, I think I might look into it.
Contact me, david265, in private on OGS with your email address so we can arrange a time for our first meeting at OGS.