Oh, that makes sense. Thanks.
You win rated games against other players close to your current rank level.
Also - just a few words about 9x9 versus larger boards. The common wisdom here and elsewhere is that beginners should start on 9x9, and that 13x13 or 19x19 are just too complex - or too long - for beginners.
Personally I do not agree. Why?
Well, the game of Go is very broad and includes a LOT of different elements. A lot of those elements have to do with BUILDING something - creating a framework of stones that slowly encloses potential until it becomes secure territory.
However, on a 9x9, there is so little wiggle room, that both opponents very quickly get into
- contact fights
- capturing races / shortage of liberties
- life-and-death problems (aka Tsumego)
and IMHO those 3 elements are the MOST DIFFICULT things for beginners to understand. Yes, the concept that a group needs 2 eyes to make life is a fundamental piece that each beginner needs to learn, but actually trying to make a living group through trial-and-error as another opponent keeps repeatedly trying to kill you is a very difficult way to learn those lessons.
Another unintended consequence of beginners learning by playing exclusively 9x9, is that so much of their early learning focusses on fighting, capturing, or killing - rather than MAKING LIFE - and these lessons do not translate well if and when they do try playing on bigger boards.
So yeah, I know I’m going against the grain of conventional wisdom here, but IMHO there is a lot for beginners to learn on larger boards. Here is an article I posted where I try to sum up some of those things. Hope it helps:
On the big boards there’s a lot to keep track of, no?
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Yes, but a lot fewer of those things involve your group getting captured and dying quickly.
On a 9x9, the lethal consequences of a blunder / mis-calculation happen very quickly - but often long before the beginner player learns to realize it.
In other words, your stones on a 9x9 board may look like they can still live, but a more experienced player can tell that there’s no way they can make 2 eyes given the current board position. That type of situational awareness can take a LONG TIME to learn (see FALSE EYES )
On a bigger board, there is more room for your stones to simply RUN AWAY - if your opponent takes the edge, you take the outside, and your group can survive there as long as it can run to reinforcements or make eyes in the middle. That gives you a lot more options.
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Sounds like different games.
The joke is
“Go on 19x19 is like two empires engaged in a long, complex campaign of conquest on many fronts at the same time - 9x9 is a knife fight in a broom closet”
Same rules - very different experiences.
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Example - please take a look at this game here:
Midway through the game - around moves 35-38 - White probably thought they still had a chance to make life in the upper right corner. It was probably a great surprise to them when Black managed to not only capture that corner, but the rest of the board as well.
This is what I mean by “knife fight in a broom closet” - it’s very easy for innocent seeming mis-calculations to snowball into sudden death, and it takes a LOT of tactical and strategic awareness to learn how to see those ahead of time - something that is very difficult for beginner players to learn.
Worse yet - just getting killed over and over in 9x9 games doesn’t teach you how to avoid getting killed next time. Learning how to solve Tsumego problems can fill in some of those blanks (i.e. “play on the VITAL POINT before your opponent does”), but applying them to real-life in-game situations takes a lot of time and learning.
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Perhaps I should add that this probability imbalance of 100 Elo for a 1-rank difference is not constant over the whole range of go ranks. For DDK (double digit kyu ~20k to 10k) the probability gap for a 1-rank difference (like 17k vs 18k) is more like 55% (or 50 Elo), while for high dan ranks (like 7d vs 6d) it’s more like 80% (or 300 Elo) for a 1-rank difference.
So gaining a rank gets progressively tougher as you climb the ranks. New players may gain a rank in days or weeks, but later on that may take months, years or even decades.
The other side of the coin is that there is more room to recover on a 19x19 game. Go is in essence a game of war, but in a 9x9 game it’s more like when you lose a battle, you lose the war. On 19x19 you can lose a battle, but still win the war.
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THIS^ 100%
Also - two very experienced high-level players can have a fierce battle on the 19x19 board, and end up in a situation where no big groups end up getting captured. Sure, the odd stone ends up stranded in enemy territory, or captured in a Ko fight - but the push-and pull of gameplay is about claiming parts of the board in the most efficient order rather than capturing enemy stones / groups.
Here’s a really interesting game between a 1 dan and a 1 kyu player where they managed to keep all of their groups alive, and still had a very tense, exciting game where the win-rate went back and forth between the two.
In the middle of the game (Move 124) Black was ahead by almost 9 points. However, in the next 80 moves, White managed to grab MORE of the remaining unclaimed areas of the board - take the lead - and hold that lead for the rest of the game.
In 9x9 you make one mistake and it’s over. In 13x13 and 19x19 - you can have a slight blunder in one place, and then make up for it in another - to turn the tide of the campaign in your favor. Yes, there are more game elements to keep track of - but those elements allow more freedom and flexibility - and IMHO - they are much easier to learn than life-or-death contact fights in small spaces.
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Thanks for sharing.
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Make sense, thanks.
Just out of curiosity: I know go is a very old game. In the past, did people train on smaller boards at the start?
As far as I know, smaller boards are a relatively new development (as in 20th century).
When I learned go at the end of the 80s, beginners would move to 19x19 quite quickly once they got the rules down after finishing a course in an IRL go club.
But a 19x19 game may take about an hour to finish. There are downsides to that.
For one, the feedback loop can be rather long between a mistake and its consequences. That may hinder learning.
Also, people may not want to devote such a long time to a single game these days. Especially with younger kids this is a challenge.
I’ve taught about 600 kids in my (Dutch/Belgian) village how to play go over the past 15 years. I’d say that only 5% of them were willing to spend more than 15 minutes on a single game of go. So 9x9 fits well for the vast majority of them.
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Anything to add? @claire_yang
Her profile shows she hasn’t visited the OGS forums in almost 4 years, so she may not respond to your question.
No worries.
You could try onlymove.net , if offers real positions with only one winning move, of appropriate difficulty for your level to learn from. Instant feedback, inbuilt review and spaced repetition so you are not just clicking and forgetting, but actually learning from the positions. And it also eventually learns your specific weaknesses and exposes you more to those positions.
Also I wouldn’t worry too much about small boards, they transfer just fine to 19x19. Personally I started with 9x9, played it a lot, when I finally tried 19x19, it took me 6 games to reach 9 kyu rank.
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I’m a bit confused about the objecive of these puzzles. How do you know what a winning move is?
The simplest answer is - they challenge the player to find the one place that will result in the greatest point gain or preventing the greatest point loss with a single move
However, in order to make sense of these puzzles, a player needs to understand a LOT of seemingly separate elements about the game - many of which are completely new or unknown to 30-25 kyu beginners.
IMHO - these would be useful (at a given rank level) to someone who has been playing many games, and can recognize some of these situations from real life / their own experiences. As a way of learning about the Go concepts / elements in question, it’s not a good starting point IMHO because a player has to understand WHY a given move is important in order to be able to find it.
Lastly - for me the website began with questions in the 15 kyu range - I don’t know if it even has puzzle questions for 30-25 kyu players. Does it? Does anyone know?