19x19 is the standard. When learning, people tend to begin with a 9x9 board. The sometimes move into a 13x13 board if not straight to the 19x19 board. I also play on a 13x13 for quicker games.
Man I didn't realize the OGS tutorial was this useless. They don't even discuss the concepts of life and death or eyes before throwing you in and asking you to solve problems based on those concepts. Interactive Way To Go and 321Go are much better suggestions that I see you've already read.
18:41 Holy hell, that exercise didn't explain a damn thing. The reason why G1 was the correct move is because it puts the white group at F1-3 in "seki" with the black group at D1-3 etc. What this means is that those two groups are effectively in a standoff because neither player will want to play E1-2. Here's why: Once you've got the stone at G1 down, both groups only have two liberties left: E1 and E2. If White wants to try to capture the black group, they would have to play in one of those spaces, reducing the Black group *and their own White group* to one liberty, because the two groups are using the same liberties. If either player plays in there, both groups go into Atari... but then it's the other player's turn! Seki means that whoever plays in there first loses their stones, so neither player will play in there, and both groups are effectively alive because neither one is going to be captured. And it would be great if the tutorial had already explained how scoring works so you know why that's important. :/
For the ladder lesson, the extra stone black had on the board at the top was a ladder breaker. White didn't continue the ladder due to one of its stones being put in atari (it was one move from being captured), so it defended that stone by connecting it to other stones. If one rung of the ladder fails, the whole structure fails. If white goes to G7, black can play on E6 capturing F6 and putting E5 in atari.
Ibrahim! Amazing video. I’ve been playing 51 years. Taught many players. The website you chose has an interesting approach: pure applied and no discursive explanations. And even so, without words of instruction, you figured out the essential suicide rule. Very cool. A friendly voice of course, someone over your shoulder, would work too. Happy to lend an experienced hand if you wish. Would live to play when you’d like to engage in a teaching game. I enjoyed your video tremendously.
Recommend the Cho-Chikun Elementary puzzles, there are a lot of them but it follows a logical progression. They can also be found on OGS (online-go.com)
7:22 19x19 is the "official" size. Smaller sizes are used for beginners, because everything being kind of cramped together means that there's a much shorter distance between cause and effect. A beginner might make a mistake on a bigger board that might not get punished until much later in the game simply because the other player has bigger fish to fry at the time, but a 9x9 game is like a knife fight in a phone booth. Mistakes get exploited and punished immediately, so beginners learn more quickly. The problem with a 9x9 is that there's almost no center territory to fight over, so the game can't get that complicated. 13x13 scales this up. Notice that the board size approximately doubles each time: 9x9 =81, 13x13 = 169, 19x19 = 361. Further, notice that the sides always have an odd number of points, so every board has a center point. Bigger sizes than 19x19 don't really add much complexity to the game, and they just make it longer, so they aren't typically used.
@@blackbirdphys yes they fall into different categories. At the highest level professional games can last a day or even in rare cases two days (adjournment) like chess. But the rhythm of play is different to chess. Because the board size is so much larger, calculation plays a different role, and players typically make moves faster than in chess.
7:00 Corners, Sides, Middle is the usual play order not because you're less vulnerable in the corners, in fact the opposite is true. In the corners you're more vulnerable because it takes less stones to surround and capture territory in the corners. Since each stone represents an entire turn, the less stones you play to surround territory, the better. You want to play in the corners first and lock down that space before your opponent.
17:40 Okay, so groups die when they run out of liberties, and you normally can't place a stone such that it will have zero liberties when it hits the board. BUT. If placing that stone removes the last liberty from an enemy group, thereby capturing it, then the move is legal because the stone you just placed to *make* that capture will have at least one liberty *after* the enemy group is captured. OGS is a great place to play, but hoooo boy could this tutorial use some work explaining why things are the way they are.
9:45 So when you played G6, you put the white stone at F6 into "Atari," which is when a stone or group only has one liberty or breathing space left (F6's last liberty was at E6), which means that unless White saves that stone somehow, you can capture it on the next move. White opted to protect F6 by connecting it to E5 via E6, joining the stones together into a single three-stone group with three liberties. Of course, this means they don't get to capture your running group, which means that the stones at G4 and H5 are now vulnerable to attack, but that's Go, baby! All about tradeoffs. And yes, this use of the word "Atari" is where the computer company got its name.
22:25 the reason why h5 is the correct move here is because if White plays there, they get an eye at J6. One eye isn't normally enough to live, but this is seki. And when it comes to seki situations like this, one eye beats no eyes. If White gets an eye and you don't, White can continue to surround and capture.
6:24 a major reason to start in the corner is because it's easier to wall it off and form a living group there because you don't need to play as many stones to do it. Consider an empty 3x3 area; out in the center of the board, you could surround that with 12 stones (imagine a 5x5 box with the corners cut out). On the sides, you could do it with 9 (two columns of three with a row of three sort of hovering above them). But in the corner, you can do it with 6 stones (two columns going up from adjacent sides at the corner). By the way, in order for such an empty 3x3 area to be alive, you need to place a stone in the dead center. If your opponent gets one in there first, you're in for a very complicated fight. senseis.xmp.net/?CarpentersSquare
I just wanted to echo what some of the other comments have said. This website is apparently not very good at explaining the rules. It tried to teach with a trial by fire. Pretty much any go player would be able to answer all of your questions in this video. I recommend that the next time you play, have a go playing person with you to answer some basic question. Or... I guess we could just keep shouting in the comments.
For the problem at minute 24, you fall into a common trap of "chess player thinking" : you tend to forgot that you are not forced to play anything. There is no zugzwang. So after black plays H5 and white plays J6, you considered what black can play locally, but forgot to consider that black could just no play in that area anymore. And then can white do anything to capture black ? The point of a seki is not to capture the opponent's stones before they can capture you. It's to put them in a situation where "if they try to capture you, they die". Because of that, they won't capture you (but you won't capture them either). Good job understanding the rules, by the way. This tutorial has good problems, but terrible explanations.
ua-cam.com/video/HOHYEB7g1lY/v-deo.htmlm34s Timestamp isn't exact. I couldn't get youtube to load at the perfect moment, but it's close enough. You hit the right one through guessing, and here's what makes it right. Anywhere white plays inside the structure allows black to take stones except one point (but that one doesn't help either side). If white plays G5, black can take 7 stones with J6. If white plays J4, black can take 2 stones with J6 and put the 6 stones in atari. White will snap back with J5, but that is the exact same board state as when black played H5. White can freely play at J6, but that really shows the seki. If either side plays at J4 or G5, the opponent can take the stones.
For anyone looking for a better interactive intro to Go than this, i would highly recommend playgo.to/iwtg/en/. OGS is such a great site otherwise, but its explanations of basic rules and pacing is pretty godawful. Especially "seki", which as a concept is nowhere near basic, only serves to confuse here rather than help anyone trying to learn basic Go mechanics.
@@erismaturebarbillons7849 By the way, you can still allow flash for now, I'm with Chrome v.87.0.4280.88, on MacOS 10.13.6. I don't know if it will be possible in future versions, for now I can click on the exact left of the link in the address bar, on the lock logo, and just choose "Allow" for flash content on the context menu that appears. Cheers!
20:30 Same deal here. You're trying to create a configuration where any move White makes inside there will be suicidal. J5 leaves J4 and G5 as the two remaining liberties that neither player wants to play in. 20:48 damn tutorial hasn't even explained what seki is, smh
So there's this dude named Michael Redmond, and he is the best native English-speaking Go player in the world. ua-cam.com/video/S_vWEW8TKgA/v-deo.html This dude was born in the US, picked up Go when he was a kid, and moved to Japan when he was in his early teens to study the game full-time, which is a thing that some Japanese kids do. He is European-American-Japanese.
The puzzles here are good, but holy heck does this website do a bad job of explaining things. XD I'll watch this whole video and clear anything up that I think could use some 'splainin. 5:30 A game of Go ends when there are no more profitable moves to be made, so both players pass their turns. In order to understand when it's appropriate to do that, the website you're using should explain scoring, which it doesn't do a very good job with. I'm just going to go ahead and E X P O U N D on the scoring rules of Go here. IN ANCIENT TIMES, the score was determined quite simply: whoever had the most stones on the board at the end of the game won (this is today called "stone scoring"). Players would try to create two-eye groups because two-eye groups are "alive" in the sense that they can't be captured, because even if they get completely surrounded on the outside, they still have the two internal empty spaces - "eyes" - and so can never have all of the space around them completely filled. Now because stones that are orthogonally adjacent are "connected," meaning that they basically act as one stone and share all of their breathing spaces, stones that "branch off" from a living group are likewise indestructible! Players would quickly build living shapes and then quickly try to branch off and grab as much territory as possible. Then, when all the territory was staked out, players would backfill their territory in order to maximize the number of stones they had on the board. They would fill up all but two points - the two eyes that the mega-group they just filled up needs in order to stay alive. The two eyes don't need to be close to each other; they can be on opposite sides of the board, as long as the stones surrounding them are all connected. So once each player's territory was completely filled in, the players would count the stones on the board and whoever had more was the winner. Captured stones didn't matter because stones on the board are worth points. Capturing means removing stones, which literally means removing points. Eventually, people got tired of all the backfilling at the end of the game, so they decided that they could just stop playing when it was backfill time and just count all of the empty space they had surrounded, along with the stones they had actually played. This is how modern Chinese rules work (and any system that uses it is called an "Area Scoring" system). But then Japan was like, "ha ha, we will do some elegant and subtle mathematics to make the act of scoring the end of the game more efficient!" And they created the sometimes-confusing scoring system that Western players are most familiar with. Under Japanese scoring, stones are NOT points; only territory surrounded is points. Furthermore, stones captured during the game are EXTRA points for the person who captured them (or FEWER points for the person whose stones got captured, the math is the same; my local Go group likes to put captured stones into the territory of the player they were captured from, filling their empty space to represent the points that the captures cost them). This is called the "Territory Scoring" system. All three of these scoring systems are internally consistent, and they all produce the same margins of victory. The strategies are by and large the same no matter which system you're using, but Stone Scoring and Area Scoring are a bit easier to understand. Territory Scoring does a few mathematical backflips to make figuring out the score *on an actual board* a bit of a quicker count. Unfortunately, its weirdo complications have made people think that Go scoring is more complicated than it actually is. Time to watch the rest of the video! :D
@@blackbirdphys The tutorials on this site leave a bit to be desired in terms of the order in which they explain things (I say start with scoring first, so you know how to win the damn game), but they're solid puzzles and OGS is the biggest Western server you're going to find, so it's a good place to play your games.
@@blackbirdphys OGS is actually a fantastic website to play go, but apparently their tutorial is garbage. Find a better tutorial, but don't give up on OGS just yet. As others have said, the puzzles are quite good, but it does a terrible job of explaining anything (or more to the point, it doesn't seem to even try). If we had a tutorial with exactly these problems but a little more explanatory text, I would completely change my tune.
What a bad place to start... This site doesn't explain anything and has really bad examples! Especially the first ko. It wasn't even necessary to play there because the group was already dead. Go is very logical and the basic rules are really easy to grasp. Strategies are a whole different story tho! Have fun with Go :) And I hope you find a better teacher than this horrible site!
Thank you all for your comments and recommendations, I'll be reading them to understand how to play better!
19x19 is the standard.
When learning, people tend to begin with a 9x9 board.
The sometimes move into a 13x13 board if not straight to the 19x19 board.
I also play on a 13x13 for quicker games.
The speed in which you figured out by just playing that suicide is legal if capturing was very impressive.
Man I didn't realize the OGS tutorial was this useless. They don't even discuss the concepts of life and death or eyes before throwing you in and asking you to solve problems based on those concepts.
Interactive Way To Go and 321Go are much better suggestions that I see you've already read.
18:41 Holy hell, that exercise didn't explain a damn thing.
The reason why G1 was the correct move is because it puts the white group at F1-3 in "seki" with the black group at D1-3 etc. What this means is that those two groups are effectively in a standoff because neither player will want to play E1-2. Here's why:
Once you've got the stone at G1 down, both groups only have two liberties left: E1 and E2. If White wants to try to capture the black group, they would have to play in one of those spaces, reducing the Black group *and their own White group* to one liberty, because the two groups are using the same liberties. If either player plays in there, both groups go into Atari... but then it's the other player's turn!
Seki means that whoever plays in there first loses their stones, so neither player will play in there, and both groups are effectively alive because neither one is going to be captured.
And it would be great if the tutorial had already explained how scoring works so you know why that's important. :/
For the ladder lesson, the extra stone black had on the board at the top was a ladder breaker.
White didn't continue the ladder due to one of its stones being put in atari (it was one move from being captured), so it defended that stone by connecting it to other stones. If one rung of the ladder fails, the whole structure fails.
If white goes to G7, black can play on E6 capturing F6 and putting E5 in atari.
Ibrahim! Amazing video. I’ve been playing 51 years. Taught many players. The website you chose has an interesting approach: pure applied and no discursive explanations. And even so, without words of instruction, you figured out the essential suicide rule. Very cool.
A friendly voice of course, someone over your shoulder, would work too.
Happy to lend an experienced hand if you wish. Would live to play when you’d like to engage in a teaching game.
I enjoyed your video tremendously.
Recommend the Cho-Chikun Elementary puzzles, there are a lot of them but it follows a logical progression. They can also be found on OGS (online-go.com)
27:22 Correct! The word "ko" literally means "eternity." And eternity is not allowed in Go. It is a finite game.
7:22 19x19 is the "official" size. Smaller sizes are used for beginners, because everything being kind of cramped together means that there's a much shorter distance between cause and effect. A beginner might make a mistake on a bigger board that might not get punished until much later in the game simply because the other player has bigger fish to fry at the time, but a 9x9 game is like a knife fight in a phone booth. Mistakes get exploited and punished immediately, so beginners learn more quickly.
The problem with a 9x9 is that there's almost no center territory to fight over, so the game can't get that complicated. 13x13 scales this up. Notice that the board size approximately doubles each time: 9x9 =81, 13x13 = 169, 19x19 = 361. Further, notice that the sides always have an odd number of points, so every board has a center point.
Bigger sizes than 19x19 don't really add much complexity to the game, and they just make it longer, so they aren't typically used.
That makes sense. Are Go games usually timed like chess, with classic, rapid, and blitz categories? Or are their different time controls?
@@blackbirdphys Yep, the timing schemes are similar to chess.
@@blackbirdphys yes they fall into different categories. At the highest level professional games can last a day or even in rare cases two days (adjournment) like chess. But the rhythm of play is different to chess. Because the board size is so much larger, calculation plays a different role, and players typically make moves faster than in chess.
7:00 Corners, Sides, Middle is the usual play order not because you're less vulnerable in the corners, in fact the opposite is true. In the corners you're more vulnerable because it takes less stones to surround and capture territory in the corners. Since each stone represents an entire turn, the less stones you play to surround territory, the better. You want to play in the corners first and lock down that space before your opponent.
Sorry your first experience was the OGS tutorial. Will you continue with this?
17:40 Okay, so groups die when they run out of liberties, and you normally can't place a stone such that it will have zero liberties when it hits the board.
BUT.
If placing that stone removes the last liberty from an enemy group, thereby capturing it, then the move is legal because the stone you just placed to *make* that capture will have at least one liberty *after* the enemy group is captured.
OGS is a great place to play, but hoooo boy could this tutorial use some work explaining why things are the way they are.
9:45 So when you played G6, you put the white stone at F6 into "Atari," which is when a stone or group only has one liberty or breathing space left (F6's last liberty was at E6), which means that unless White saves that stone somehow, you can capture it on the next move. White opted to protect F6 by connecting it to E5 via E6, joining the stones together into a single three-stone group with three liberties.
Of course, this means they don't get to capture your running group, which means that the stones at G4 and H5 are now vulnerable to attack, but that's Go, baby! All about tradeoffs.
And yes, this use of the word "Atari" is where the computer company got its name.
Would love to see you play more!
You're the best first time player i've seen. But yeah, i've already noticed that chess players grasp these concepts faster than non-chess players.
22:25 the reason why h5 is the correct move here is because if White plays there, they get an eye at J6. One eye isn't normally enough to live, but this is seki. And when it comes to seki situations like this, one eye beats no eyes. If White gets an eye and you don't, White can continue to surround and capture.
Cool video! You're a terrific presenter. I hope you make more content like this on the game of Go.
Wow that is a very interesting transition, it's nice to see how these two games juxtapose! Liked! From a fellow chesstuber! :D
I would love to watch you making the next step and actually play your first game of Go!
Instructions unclear, im gonna GO ahead and stick to checkers
We have a punster over here
This is awesome, reminds me of myself when I was learning to play. I almost wish I get amnesia in order to have the same enthusiasm again :)
Definitely looking forward to this!
Oh my god! You were my lab instructor for physics 240 last year and saw you were in an Andrew Dotson vid, keep up the great work!
Thanks KP! I hope you're doing well
6:24 a major reason to start in the corner is because it's easier to wall it off and form a living group there because you don't need to play as many stones to do it. Consider an empty 3x3 area; out in the center of the board, you could surround that with 12 stones (imagine a 5x5 box with the corners cut out). On the sides, you could do it with 9 (two columns of three with a row of three sort of hovering above them). But in the corner, you can do it with 6 stones (two columns going up from adjacent sides at the corner).
By the way, in order for such an empty 3x3 area to be alive, you need to place a stone in the dead center. If your opponent gets one in there first, you're in for a very complicated fight.
senseis.xmp.net/?CarpentersSquare
i really enjoyed this! hope to see more!
Just finished watching, and it looks like you've got the hang of it! I'll friend you up when I see your OGS name!
I just wanted to echo what some of the other comments have said. This website is apparently not very good at explaining the rules. It tried to teach with a trial by fire. Pretty much any go player would be able to answer all of your questions in this video. I recommend that the next time you play, have a go playing person with you to answer some basic question. Or... I guess we could just keep shouting in the comments.
25:22 BINGO!
LOL as a class C chess player and a fairly new Go player, I laugh and I love your pain.
26:30 The tutorial wants you to play at A1 to capture all the white stones in there.
For the problem at minute 24, you fall into a common trap of "chess player thinking" : you tend to forgot that you are not forced to play anything. There is no zugzwang. So after black plays H5 and white plays J6, you considered what black can play locally, but forgot to consider that black could just no play in that area anymore. And then can white do anything to capture black ?
The point of a seki is not to capture the opponent's stones before they can capture you. It's to put them in a situation where "if they try to capture you, they die". Because of that, they won't capture you (but you won't capture them either).
Good job understanding the rules, by the way. This tutorial has good problems, but terrible explanations.
23:52 if White plays J6, it's a wasted move and you can ignore it. XD Seki is still seki.
ua-cam.com/video/HOHYEB7g1lY/v-deo.htmlm34s
Timestamp isn't exact. I couldn't get youtube to load at the perfect moment, but it's close enough.
You hit the right one through guessing, and here's what makes it right. Anywhere white plays inside the structure allows black to take stones except one point (but that one doesn't help either side).
If white plays G5, black can take 7 stones with J6.
If white plays J4, black can take 2 stones with J6 and put the 6 stones in atari. White will snap back with J5, but that is the exact same board state as when black played H5.
White can freely play at J6, but that really shows the seki. If either side plays at J4 or G5, the opponent can take the stones.
you can just type the timestamp in, homie
and then people can just click on and skip to
example: 4:20 all day
For anyone looking for a better interactive intro to Go than this, i would highly recommend playgo.to/iwtg/en/. OGS is such a great site otherwise, but its explanations of basic rules and pacing is pretty godawful. Especially "seki", which as a concept is nowhere near basic, only serves to confuse here rather than help anyone trying to learn basic Go mechanics.
This (great!) website doesn't work anymore because it was it was using Flash. There is an HTML version here: wtg.usgo.org/#/en/intro
@@erismaturebarbillons7849 Oh! Thank you so much! I had no idea, bookmarking.
@@erismaturebarbillons7849 By the way, you can still allow flash for now, I'm with Chrome v.87.0.4280.88, on MacOS 10.13.6. I don't know if it will be possible in future versions, for now I can click on the exact left of the link in the address bar, on the lock logo, and just choose "Allow" for flash content on the context menu that appears.
Cheers!
Did you carry on. This would have been a good series if you carried on.
20:30 Same deal here. You're trying to create a configuration where any move White makes inside there will be suicidal. J5 leaves J4 and G5 as the two remaining liberties that neither player wants to play in.
20:48 damn tutorial hasn't even explained what seki is, smh
So there's this dude named Michael Redmond, and he is the best native English-speaking Go player in the world.
ua-cam.com/video/S_vWEW8TKgA/v-deo.html
This dude was born in the US, picked up Go when he was a kid, and moved to Japan when he was in his early teens to study the game full-time, which is a thing that some Japanese kids do. He is European-American-Japanese.
The puzzles here are good, but holy heck does this website do a bad job of explaining things. XD
I'll watch this whole video and clear anything up that I think could use some 'splainin.
5:30 A game of Go ends when there are no more profitable moves to be made, so both players pass their turns. In order to understand when it's appropriate to do that, the website you're using should explain scoring, which it doesn't do a very good job with. I'm just going to go ahead and E X P O U N D on the scoring rules of Go here.
IN ANCIENT TIMES, the score was determined quite simply: whoever had the most stones on the board at the end of the game won (this is today called "stone scoring"). Players would try to create two-eye groups because two-eye groups are "alive" in the sense that they can't be captured, because even if they get completely surrounded on the outside, they still have the two internal empty spaces - "eyes" - and so can never have all of the space around them completely filled.
Now because stones that are orthogonally adjacent are "connected," meaning that they basically act as one stone and share all of their breathing spaces, stones that "branch off" from a living group are likewise indestructible! Players would quickly build living shapes and then quickly try to branch off and grab as much territory as possible. Then, when all the territory was staked out, players would backfill their territory in order to maximize the number of stones they had on the board. They would fill up all but two points - the two eyes that the mega-group they just filled up needs in order to stay alive. The two eyes don't need to be close to each other; they can be on opposite sides of the board, as long as the stones surrounding them are all connected.
So once each player's territory was completely filled in, the players would count the stones on the board and whoever had more was the winner. Captured stones didn't matter because stones on the board are worth points. Capturing means removing stones, which literally means removing points.
Eventually, people got tired of all the backfilling at the end of the game, so they decided that they could just stop playing when it was backfill time and just count all of the empty space they had surrounded, along with the stones they had actually played. This is how modern Chinese rules work (and any system that uses it is called an "Area Scoring" system).
But then Japan was like, "ha ha, we will do some elegant and subtle mathematics to make the act of scoring the end of the game more efficient!" And they created the sometimes-confusing scoring system that Western players are most familiar with. Under Japanese scoring, stones are NOT points; only territory surrounded is points. Furthermore, stones captured during the game are EXTRA points for the person who captured them (or FEWER points for the person whose stones got captured, the math is the same; my local Go group likes to put captured stones into the territory of the player they were captured from, filling their empty space to represent the points that the captures cost them). This is called the "Territory Scoring" system.
All three of these scoring systems are internally consistent, and they all produce the same margins of victory. The strategies are by and large the same no matter which system you're using, but Stone Scoring and Area Scoring are a bit easier to understand. Territory Scoring does a few mathematical backflips to make figuring out the score *on an actual board* a bit of a quicker count. Unfortunately, its weirdo complications have made people think that Go scoring is more complicated than it actually is.
Time to watch the rest of the video! :D
That's really fascinating! Let me know what other things the tutorial left out, seems like I need a better website!
@@blackbirdphys The tutorials on this site leave a bit to be desired in terms of the order in which they explain things (I say start with scoring first, so you know how to win the damn game), but they're solid puzzles and OGS is the biggest Western server you're going to find, so it's a good place to play your games.
@@blackbirdphys OGS is actually a fantastic website to play go, but apparently their tutorial is garbage. Find a better tutorial, but don't give up on OGS just yet.
As others have said, the puzzles are quite good, but it does a terrible job of explaining anything (or more to the point, it doesn't seem to even try).
If we had a tutorial with exactly these problems but a little more explanatory text, I would completely change my tune.
What a bad place to start... This site doesn't explain anything and has really bad examples! Especially the first ko. It wasn't even necessary to play there because the group was already dead. Go is very logical and the basic rules are really easy to grasp. Strategies are a whole different story tho! Have fun with Go :) And I hope you find a better teacher than this horrible site!