Why aren't you playing Go user? It's fun

I'm not talking rules, nigger. The rules are simple. Fundamentals and strategies are not rules.

Online Go server online-go.com

Tygem (korean server) tygemgo.com/

There is KGS too but it feels really old, but it has more players than OGS gokgs.com/

both KGS and OGS are western servers

those two ideas are the fundamentals of the game, you want surefire ways to do them in the game but that is about efficiency rather than fundamentals, fundamentals are connecting your stones, disconnecting the enemy, surrounding space and your enemy

Strategies are just ways to interpret how to do those things in the most efficient way, using large frameworks to incite the enemy to enter and then try to capture or settle the rest of the board, playing in a way to prevent large frameworks, pincering and playing in a way to make a lot of groups trying to capture each other, giving the enemy large frameworks with a hidden invasion that will make several weak groups or will leave him with nothing

All the vocabulary of the game just makes all of this more easy to interpret, invasions, reductions, potential (aji), frameworks (moyo), unsettled groups, bases, extensions, pincers, double/splitting attacks, leaning attacks, large sacrifices, exchanges, probes, overextensions and failed attacks, sabaki (saving groups with sacrifices), etc

because im to fucking stupid
real fucking answer
i can't play chess for shit either

>It's only hard if you get pressured into becoming the very best fast
= "It's not hard if you give up on playing well"
No kidding.

well, i would say that at 12 kyu the game of go looks like one and that isn't that difficult to achieve by just playing

since alphago already plays better than any pro, i would say you will never play "well" enough, some professional plays are actually trash in the eyes of alphago but good enough in the eyes of an amateur.

also you can't really fast-track your progress, the brain just subconsciously picks the ideas and makes them usable, it's not like you can actually memorize or study the game, you can just train your pattern abilities with close-fighting problems and then improvise in the fly with the principles you already know and your intuition

because no game insults my intelligence badly as Go, mahjong being the close second.

>Look faggot, what do you mean you can't arrange rocks around rocks without getting surrounded yourself?
>Why didn't you fucking know to start your opening so you can have proper foundation for expansions 50 moves later?

How far up does the ultra peaceful playstyle go on KGS? I haven't played there since I was ~8k but it was ridiculous how people would just try to split the board in half and go straight from opening to endgame without a middlegame. It was a lot more fun playing with the crazy gooks trying to kill or invade everything.

It's something personal, some players go up to 9 dan being crazy and others go up to 9 dan being calm and passive

Although once you get better you can force fights everywhere and your opponents has no chances other than just fighting too

For example overextending or doing an approach with a very large extension-base is a good way to start a fight by making the other guy invade in a pre-pincered position, or giving away some territory in exchange of an attack for another group, all that gives wild fighting everywhere

AlphaGo also starts fighting by invading early and then pincering a wall by keeping the initiative

I have no idea how to play in a standard sized goban.

Had fun playing in the small one, but ended just solving tsumego from books.

Because I am not a weeb faggot.

no friends

I can't play it right ever since I misplaced the soccer ball

I just played it this evening after work. Just me and my sensei. He is something like 4 Kyu and I am maybe 12 Kyu, pushing SDK every day.

So in other words it's the Dark Souls of board games.

Because while I'll suck dick and eat ass, there are some kinds of faggotry that are just too gay for me.

I lost my board.

We all mourn the loss of Veeky Forums.

Too busy playing tafl.

An intellectual like myself can't be bothered by games that are winnable with some simple algorithm, like Go. I prefer games that can never be played by an AI, like D&D 5e.

I know it's a joke, but that still hurt me deep inside.

>being this much of a brainlet

Different user here but with comparable experience.
The most basic thing that gives me the most trouble is that I don't really know how to tell for sure whether territory can be invaded even on a 9x9. Like in my picture, how do I tell if the marked white stone was a blunder on white's part or white taking advantage of a weakness in black's structure? I have no idea how to tell aside from trying to brute force every way it could play out, which obviously doesn't work for most situations.

>It's fun
I disagree.

Did someone say dark souls?

That's what makes the game hard, you'll learn by playing a lot of matchs
Watching matchs can be good too

>simple algorithm

Neural networks is far from simple algorithm, actually i'm sure neural networks with the processor power of the deepmind studio is enough to solve any game, be it video games or board games

9x9 is too small for actual invasions that would work, but beginners can still make them work

honestly reading moves ahead becomes second nature after a while, the brain just gets used to it and you don't even have to make an effort, sometimes you get a tetris effect while you try to sleep

also there is some weird kind of subconscious pattern recognition that gives you a feeling that some position has a weakness or something exploitable, then you start reading and find the actual weakness. After a while if you see two stones with enough base or eye space you just know that it's alive, or at least you know it's hard to kill, you don't even have to read it.

that's why people say that with tactical problems and playing you get the most improvement possible, it's the same as in chess, you need to make your brain learn the most fundamental shapes and then it will do the work for you subsconsciously while you care about more abstract things like strategy and grand-scale decisions.

about your question:

learning basic shapes also gives some heuristics to analyze a position, for example white has two playable cutting points F4 and D4, and if black tries to encircle white by defending one of the cutting points and then pushing white, white will be able to cut the C3 stone, and probably will kill that group in the corner or will gain enough strength from the fight to connect to the upper right corner

Anyone here play Hnefatafl? It reminds me a bit of a cross between Go and Chess, you shift pieces around and have a king, but it's primarily based arround surrounding and fencing in.

senseis.xmp.net/?HazamaTobi

Black should have played this way, let white connect after he saw that attacking would make his corner weak, and then invade splitting the top, probably one of the white groups would die

In 19x19 this quickly can become really exciting because of the sheer amount of groups interacting with each other, you can do a lot of attacks trying to attack multiple groups at once with multiple cutting points and variations

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Bump is likely the best play and will kill the white stone.

Okay, likely might be a bit too strong, but it is one of the set of playable moves.

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I am? It is.

Learning is the easy bit. Game's got less rules than checkers.

>Go is fun because every time you get beat you feel like an idiot but when you win you feel like the smartest man alive.
Pretty accurate.

>So in other words it's the Dark Souls of board games.
Pretty accurate.

Yeah, I'm with you. Only way to start to "see" it really is to play a bunch. You can play a 9x9 blitz game against the computer in like 2 minutes. That's how I initially got a handle on the rules, just smashed out 3 or 4 games on my phone whenever I was waiting around for something.

You'll hit a plateau where you need to start playing full size games against humans to get better, but when you're first learning it helps to just get in as many quick matches as you possibly can.

Dark Souls: The Board Game isn't actually the dark souls of board games, though... it's like the Dark Souls 3 of board games.

You are quite right, only thing white can do is set a capture race by getting an eye in the side and trying to kill the center group or the corner

Do lots of problems and do them over and over again. My biggest gains in strength came from doing several problem sets totaling a few thousand problems over and over until I had them more or less memorized. You are rarely going to find something novel (to you) during the course of a game, instead you are going to fall back onto your level on training, so drilling the shit out of shapes and sequences is really the only way to start seeing them in your own games. And don't worry about problems being too easy, if you have to think for any time at all the problem isn't too easy. And find some easier problem sets you can do on your phone (cho chikun's life and death pdfs, good 101weiqi sets) so you can drill them wherever.

It’s been solved, might as well play Tic Tac Toe

>solved
>the alphago evaluations actually made the game more open and you literally can play anywhere and get an even result if you can handle it

Here is my ogs account if someone wants a game

online-go.com/user/view/462883

I've got a really stupid question; how do you physically remove pieces from the board without disrupting the board state?

Push the far side down with you middle finger so you can get your index finder underneath the near side without disturbing the surrounding stones, and don't have gigantic fingers.

youtube.com/watch?v=qt1FvPxmmfE

>I've got a really stupid question; how do you physically remove pieces from the board without disrupting the board state?
This is the reason a lot of players prefer the double-convex stones to the (slightly more common) variation that are flat on one side - they are a little easier to pick up. Also the reason most players usually prefer fatter stones made of a "real" material like stone or glass, as opposed to the lighter plastic ones, since being heavier makes them less likely to move by accident.

Not exactly related to the topic, but is Shogi any good? I've only seen it tangentially in Naruto, but I now have a bigger interest due to Persona 5's best waifu.

Yeah. No. Learn to play and you might notice alphago didn't solve anything, but opened the field for variety of different possibilities that Pro players had for the longest times deemed 'unplayable'.

Alphago is playing moves that Go Seigen had started to research in his later years, but none of his things were delved deeper, probably because the korean/chinese style of playing got more popular.

The way he picked all those 5 stones swiftly like that seems a bit magical. Probably jew despite being japanese.

Best chess variant, drop are great. I'm not any good at it though.

AlphaGo just mocks whatever you do. You think you have a solid shape down on board and it goes around to rip it apart showing how your five stones were, in fact, not connected at all.

>Learning is the easy bit. Game's got less rules than checkers.
Can we not fall into this meme? Learning the rules of go and learning to play go aren't the same thing. You don't know how to play an instrument just because you know how to physically produce a sound.

It's not really a meme. It's true that Go is easy to learn, as it has so few simple rules. It's also true that you can study and learn to play it for your entire life never reaching the level where you can't get better.

One could argue that you have learned to play an instrument if you can produce the sound it's supposed to make. How good you are at it is completely different matter.

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