Go is not easy

I used the Interactive Way to Go as my introduction to the rules. It looked pretty informative with clickable java programs showing each rule, and I was done with it soon enough. I thought to myself - Okay, now I'm ready to give this a shot! What do I have to lose?

Apparently my dignity, pride, cockiness, and any form of hubris you can think of. It was very humbling.

The past week or so, I have been playing some computer go at home. I have been losing nonstop. This has been really frustrating, especially when I'm given a huge 9 stone lead on a small beginner board that's 13x13 in size. No matter what I put down the computer had a counter for it instantly.

Totally massacred each time.

So I set out to read more about Go. Maybe find something about overall strategy on the internet. I dug into a few go related sites I'd found:

The Sensei's Library
Tel's Go Notes
Wikipedia's entries on Go, and Go Strategy/Tactics
and oddly enough,
Hitachi's Life and Death Problems of Go which is too advanced for me but they give good descriptions of what is going on.
(what's an electronics company have to do with Go theory?)

Even the online game store I bought my Go set at has a pdf that describes how to play.

Anyways, spending this time in front of a computer seems to be more productive than spending in from of a go game at this point, though I wouldn't actually stop playing - I have to try out what I'm reading about after all.

So my splatter movie grade deaths are getting a little less spectacular now, and I get to throw a few punches as I'm sinking.

Sometimes a punch actually connects and I win, though it's more luck than anything else.

Allen.

* The version I've been trying is the open source GnuGo, compiled to run on my Windows PC. (Using a Drago interface)