The Ing Foundation now owns a building in Menlo Park and funds a full-time professional teacher -- Zhujiu's brother Mingjiu, who works mainly with Chinese children in the Bay Area. Brown has pitched in as well; last year he helped coordinate a pilot program teaching the game to about 90 students at Lincoln, Lowell, and Washington high schools. The experience left Brown feeling "a little burned out," but also validated; he's starting to see proof that not only can Go work here, but that it is.
For Brown, the game represents "a new paradigm for lots of things that I think would be better for us. In chess, it's all about who conquers the other person. In Go, you're sharing the space. I've never seen a game where people are so excited when they tie. It's such a good feeling to tie in this game."
Paul Trapani
Paul Trapani
Anders Kierulf, founder of Smart Go.
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It is often said that the way you play Go reflects your personality. I'm a loser. Basic Go tactics are easy enough to comprehend, and there are plenty of books with practice problems to study. Like chess books, they present situations where certain shapes of stones live or die depending on the next move: "black to play and kill," "white to play and live," and so forth. Like a lot of beginners, though, I have trouble recognizing those same shapes in the midst of a game -- too many stones are doing too many things in too many places. Guy Moreau teaches the game to beginners on Tuesday nights at the San Francisco Go Club (which means some members make it a point to avoid the club then -- too noisy) and charitably runs me through the ABCs: how to keep stones out of atari(the equivalent of check in chess), and recognizing the "eye" shapes that connected stones are supposed to make to live. Gleefully, over the course of weeks, he runs me through some of the more complex but essential strategic moves: the pin, the snapback, the bamboo joint, the knight's move, the monkey jump, and more. After he shows me each one of them, he laughs as if to say, "Isn't that neat?"
Which they are ... eventually. But the strategic moves don't make sense until you start internalizing them. Learning doesn't come easy, which is why sometimes people eagerly walk in on Tuesday evenings, get a rundown of the rules, then suddenly realize they have someplace else to be after about an hour. To ease the process, Moreau teaches with a practice board -- a miniature 9-by-9 grid -- and gives me a five-stone handicap. It's the Go equivalent of bumper bowling. One evening early in my studies, when Moreau is busy with another student, a regular offers to play against me. I dutifully set up the 9-by-9 board and my five-stone handicap. He looks at this for a while.
"Nine-by-nine boards only get a two-stone handicap," he says soberly, removing three stones.
The game is fast, and very ugly. You're supposed to start linking up stones to mark off territory, but you're also supposed to be cutting off your opponent's attempts to link his stones, but those attempts start putting your own stones in danger, and you've gotten nowhere in creating territory because you're too busy trying to keep your stones from being captured, and eventually I'm looking at this simple little board and realizing that absolutely nothing is going to work, and my grand plan to own at least half the board has resulted in my owning, in a word, nothing. The college education, the ability to finish the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle, the shelf of Don DeLillo novels -- it's all useless, useless.
"I've lost everything," I say, breaking a rule. It's bad form to talk about a game while it's in progress. (In ink. I can finish the Sunday Timespuzzle in ink.)
"Yes, but we have to finish it," he says. I try commandeering a teensy corner of the board for pride's sake, and lose even that.
"You should talk to Guy," he tells me as we clear off the board and return the stones to their bowls. "He teaches beginners."
