My Introduction to Go

I was first introduced to Go in 2000 by the movie π. In this movie, the main character, a statistician of sorts, plays Go with his mentor. I thought the game looked nice in an aesthetic sense, and so I got a little starter Go book with a little tiny cardboard Goban and plastic stones. I learned the basic rules, but didn't play much. I did still enjoy the aesthetics quite a bit, and so I bought a Go set from Samarkand. Shortly after receiving it, I stopped playing. Later, around 2003, I started playing again, but quit after about a month and having bought a couple of instructional books. I was probably close to a meager 24 Kyu ranking on KGS when I quit.

A lot has changed in my life over the last few years, and I have recently taken the game up again. My main issue before was not having a consistent Go playing partner. My girlfriend, however, loves the game, and we play together each day. We are also watching Hikaru No Go online until our DVD rentals of the series arrive from Netflix. We started playing on 9x9 boards, with four handicap stones for her, and we go back and forth between winning. The smaller board got boring quick, and so we have moved up to the 13x13 board. We are using five stones on this board, and we are each winning about half of the games. If I had to guess, I would say that Holly is 29 or 30 Kyu, and I am around 25 or 26 Kyu.

Today I played my first 13x13 game on KGS in a number of years. I was White and playing against mrnoob [18k]. There were no handicap stones, and so it was quite a satisfying victory, as you can imagine. Here are a few pictures of the game. The fight for the lower-middle area was quite interesting. I ended up winning by about 33 Moku.