I finally plucked up the courage and entered a local Go club, only to find no-one there! A bit of shouting summoned the talkative old lady who runs the place and professes to know nothing of the game, who then called up a guy to play me, despite my protestations...
A bit of background on the rankings: Fresh players (me!) start around 30-25 kyuu, and quickly work their way up to 10 kyuu-ish, more slowly to 1 kyuu, then it flips over and you start at amateur 1 dan and crawl up to 7 dan. Roughly speaking, for every difference in rank you are entitled to place one handicap stone on the board, to a maximum of 9 in a pre-set pattern. Professionals have a separate dan ranking from 1 to 9, where 1 is roughly equivalent to a 7 dan amateur.
Needless to say, in my first ever game on a full-sized board Yoshio, a 5-dan player and the guy with more hair, whupped my butt good, despite my 9 stone handicap. My second ever game against the other guy I lost by a mere 26.5 points with an 8 stone handicap. I was very proud, and somewhat shocked, that I managed to force the game to be played through to a final count.
Yoshio was quite effusive with his praise, if I understood him correctly, and showed me some Joseki opening moves and some fundamental differences between playing on a small and a real board. He expects I can hit 5 kyuu in time.
In the game you see here Yoshio (white) won quite handily against the other guy I played after a protracted fight in the centre.
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4 comments:
I know nothing about Go, so mainly I'm interested in the kyu-dan grading type thing. Does that predate Kano's incorporation of a similar system into judo? Like a general grading of things in Japan from 'inexperienced' to 'master' or something like that?
Fucked if I know matey. I do recall the ranking system was introduced around the 17th century though. Go arrived in Japan in the early 7th century, and was invented in China, probably around 2200-2300BC.
It's also the best game of all time, ever.
17th century...hmm. I suppose Kano could have had some relation to it, as he introduced his ranks in the late 19th century, I think. But I haven't really looked into it; what do 'kyu' and 'dan' actually mean?
Is Go also the same thing you tried to show me a few years ago, before you left for Japan? I think that was Chinese, but judging by your comment I'm guessing they're related?
kyuu (級) and dan (段) both mean grade, but kyuu is also used in class and school-related vocabulary, while dan is also used in vocabulary that literally means steps. Not sure if the etymology is really useful there.
The Japanese just really liked grading their competitive sports.
And no, that was Xiang Qi or chinese chess, also very good but like any chess variant it's not as reliant on intuition or as freeform as Go.
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