Learn To Play Go! A Guide for Beginners

welcome future go players if you found this link that means that you're trying to figure out how to get into this game of Go maybe you've heard it from you know hey Cara no go the anime it's great pictures on the right maybe you've heard it from the alphago buzz Facebook's not Facebook Google and Facebook's attempted programs where Google had beaten a pro at the game maybe you're into math and saw how complex numerically the game ago was whatever your reason you want to learn and so I decided I'll be a really cool idea to have sort of a video series dedicated to someone that has no experience at the game teach them their rules and then every week sort of give them tips on how they can increment their skill in sort of a real-time basis I actually just started teaching my friend the game a week ago and so like in real life and so what I can do is every week I could sort of get him on sort of see the things that he's been struggling with and what has helped him improve and hopefully that can help anybody trying to play go get a little bit better at the game more quickly without further ado let's get started Sogo is extremely simple there's only two rules really those rules have to do with territory and capturing I'm going to go through territory first then I'm going to go through capturing that I'm going to sort of show you some of the complexities that can arise when trying to figure out how capturing exactly works because it's not the easiest thing to understand when you're first learning how to do it so you've got a blank board unlike in chess where the pieces are there when the board when the game starts totally blank um when you pn a go game which kind of makes a little more confusing a little less less confined so people can sort of get confused but the main goal of the game a is white and black take turns placing stones on the board like so just putting snow don't worry about what moves I'm making but essentially white and black take turns doing this and eventually what ends up happening is do you see how white and black are starting to like close off areas in a way um White's beginning to surround you intuitively see the whites surrounding the left-half and black sort of surrounding the right-half when you surround points like this it's called territory and at the end of the game whoever has the most territory oops whoever has the most territory is the winner and that's the objective of the game is to stress around the most points as you can so it seems pretty simple but you might try to you know figure out how exactly you define what is your territory right so I've just got a few basic problems for you just to get you into the idea of like how many points each person has and how to count territory so let's go through that now alright so there's four many problems for you to do if you're just learning I recommend pausing the video after I explain and trying to make sure you get the right answers yourself before moving on to see what the real answer is so you have four groups here a B C and D try to figure out how many points of territory each one has as it stands right now so pause the video and give it a count and then unpause all right so you've counted so we can see a a few cool differences so let's start with Group A right a is surrounding one two three four five six seven eight points of territory these points are completely surrounded by white the only thing these points are connected to is either the edge of the board or another white stone let's try B one two three four five six alright seems good enough these are all points that are surrounded within the area C C's interesting um c only has 1 2 3 points and now you might be wondering about this point where the X is right here but it turns out you don't always need to have the corners connected in order to surround points another way of saying this is even oops that's a letter even without that corner stone there white is still surrounding this point and that is still White's territory um so you don't need to have all the corners completely surrounded but many times it's important for reasons I'll explain later nd using 6 again you might be wondering about these guys these points what's the deal with these these are called neutral points all these things they're not connect they're not surrounded by either white or black notice that white touches the area with the where these points are and so does black so these are nobody's points right now however as the game progresses it will generally those will generally get filled in you can imagine white can try to surround points by maybe starting to go here and if white gets a few more moves oops white gets a few more moves in then the territory is now filled in and that is White's even without this that one point became White's so and now you can even see that if white connects is one more stone than White's gained all of these because now all these points are surrounded so that's the basis of territory and that's sort of how to count territory then the objective is to get more than you are opponent easy enough okay now take a look at this example we can see that black right off the bat um you can sort of estimate right that he's got more area he's surrounded more points than white does white only has 21 count 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 19 20 21 black has those same 21 points on this side plus like 10 more so it looks like black would win this game however what would happen if white just decided to plop a stone here what if white got jealous like I'm going to lose this game and puts a stone down now is that blacks territory anymore are these all neutral points huh for that matter what if white even can get something like this does that mean white now has 4 points whereas black can't do anything about it and can black do the same thing can black just plop a stone down here be like well those aren't yours no I'm sure you guess the answer is no to deal with the fact that you could play anywhere you want there's no rule saying that once your opponent surrounds an area you can't put a stone in so you can do whatever you want but there is something called capturing and go which is one of the most important parts of the game and once I explain it you'll learn how to capture and you'll understand how you can make stones that can't be captured take a stone here uh that is the middle of the board it's just one stone a stone or a group of stones have what's called liberties associated with them liberties are the adjacent lines that are up down left and right of the stone not diagonal so only the lines that are connected on the grid with this point so 1 2 3 4 if white fills in all three of those points look what happens look what the computer does stone disappears once you fill all of those liberties though that stone gets captured and not only does it get removed from the board but you get a point for every stone that you capture so that could sort of make sense right if you that sort of deters you from playing in your opponent's area because if you play a stone in your opponent's territory and he kills it and surrounds it you just gave him a point um so that is sort of how capturing balances the territory and how this to complement each other for capturing let's say that black has a line of three they're connected here right now you can sort of see that what happens to that one Liberty that was supposed to be to the left of the stone um does this only have 3 liberties now well white caps rarely goes here here and here turns out when stones are connected in the same way horizontally or vertically they share liberties so instead of only 4 liberties White has her sorry black has 8 8 liberties for that entire group and if white were to fill in all of those captures the three stones so stones share liberties now it can get confusing so I want to make sure that you guys understand this bit diagonals are not connected from horizontal or vertical x' so let's see black has something like this right let's give a liberty count so we can say that one two three four five six seven eight nine this group a oops this group a has nine liberties we're not counting the diagonals right therefore if hypothetically white were to fill in all nine of those those four stones be captured even though this was diagonal away it's not connected with the main group only horizontals and verticals are and that's extremely important so make sure that you don't get that confused and that's really the basics of liberties and capturing um there's only one more thing you need to know but I think the best way to understand that is through some examples so I'm going to set some examples up and we're going to do the same thing pause the video try to solve them and then you'll get the answer all right here are the problems it is white to move in every situation your goal is to capture the group the stone or group of stones a b c and d only in one move so don't need to read like five moves ahead it's a one move thing try to make sure that you understand the concepts and it's white to move and go pause the video and we'll see what happens all right so let's take problem a is whites move we can see that this a group here is on the side of the board which means that if we give a liberty count to it oops number two one two three it doesn't have a fourth Liberty because that's off the edge of the board right which means all white has to do is play here and you capture the stone this that if the situation was reversed and it was blacks move instead black could actually capture the white stone by playing here right so ever move first capture the stone cool so let's take route B B we've got these four stones how we can count their liberties right away he would have remember adjacent to them right so one two three four because it's adjacent to this stone and not one right five six seven so we see the only thing that white needs to fill is Liberty number seven and sure enough if white were to do this captures all four of those stones not bad all right Group C you guys should be getting the hammer right now Group C has one - OH Group C has one two three four five six seven eight liberties now all white has to do is fill in that one captures a lot no problem all right Group D this is going to be the weirdest problem because that's a concerns a rule that I haven't told you yet but maybe you figured it out we can see that this group here only has if we count all the outside liberties oops got to remove all my other numbers here has one two three four five six seven and then eight on the inside but wait a minute kind of weird right can white go here avoid goes there we can see that it doesn't have any liberties left can white plain it white can't display in a place reserved liberties right so what's the deal want to automatically be captured that's the subtlety of capturing and one of the rules where if you can get liberties by capturing another stone you can place a stone there so what would happen if white put is donate well he would fill all the liberties of blacks group and because it was White's move white would capture the black group first and because once white plays here he can capture those black stones immediately his stone gets liberties by making that capture it's kind of weird but that is a subtlety and a very important one at that so to be clear let's just take the middle of the board white couldn't play a stone here this is not a legal move because as soon as white would try to play it it would get captured it's not capturing anything in return however look at this now White has surrounded three liberties of this black stone a now if white tries to do this it works because as soon as white plays here is going to capture a and get a liberty for himself it sounds simple enough right and so that's how the sort of capturing thing works now I'm going to give you guys one more salty of capturing it's called Co and after that you will have all the tools you need and I will give you some sites and some places to play and you can start your go journey it'll be great okay let's take a same situation as the one that I showed you before white is an Atari we call a stone that is one move away from being captured in Atari and it's black smooth we can see that if black plays here we know that it's capturing a white stone while getting a Liberty for itself so this is allowed so we can play and the stone is captured but look what the computer did the computer put a little square around that point what does the square mean and notice it can't put a stone there but didn't we just say that white could totally do that because if white does that he'll capture the black stone and it'll be fine well it turns out in situation like this both players could just be doing that forever they could just be white can play here black and recapture white can recapture black and recapture back and forth back and forth to infinity so there's a rule called Co where if the board looks the same at any point so the board can never look the same what that means is if I were to take this back immediately the board would look exactly the same as did two moves ago which isn't allowed therefore if the situation happens white has to play somewhere else first then if black plays somewhere else white can capture again and now the squares around the white side which means black has to play somewhere else white can play somewhere else black captures usually these codes have for some sort of positional advantage something like that it's a more high-level thing so don't worry too much about it but remember if white plays somewhere at any point black can just fill this in and white cannot capture that anymore so that's a pretty advanced topic we'll probably cover that a bit later but don't worry about that for now but know that it is a thing that you can do I'm going to give you some last uh like four more problems they're going to be a little harder but try to see what I'm talking about and how to capture each one and then you have all the tools you need all right last set of problems so you're going to want to go in order and this time play around with it and try to read a few moves ahead black it's blacks move in every one of these black wants to capture the white stones how does he do it pause the video try to figure it out if you can and unpause and we will get the answer all right so black wants to capture these stones let's start with Group A well you can see that I has 3 liberties so black and just start filling them in notice that if white tries to do anything black will simply capture these stones and if white doesn't do anything what tries to play on the outside black will just simply capture the stones no problem and that's why in general it's hard to play in your opponent's area because you'll get these stones that are surrounded by your opponent and it's difficult to keep them alive they'll just end up getting captured hug or be very easy I'm sure you've all got it just play here you've captured the blue are the two stones Group C it's interesting on this need you to read a few moves ahead so white has two liberties um so there's two ways black can actually do a capture on the easiest way in this situation and we'll go through different variations in other videos is black plays here that puts these two stones in Atari right that means that they've only got one Liberty left which is right here white wants to try to escape he's running to the edge of the board black can just follow and white is captured easy peasy you could actually even go this way now whites only wait the chance to escape is here black can play here white plays there and black captures but that's a little more advanced so it won't worry about that for now but know that there's multiple ways to do it Dee was a trick one um if you looked at Deandra like there's no way to capture white you have great intuition and you weren't exactly correct um the way that this works is we know that the only way black can play in a area that he doesn't have any liberties as if he captures something by doing it but look at this if black plays here he doesn't capture these white stones because those white stones have two liberties one to if Black Hills one in white still got one more Liberty white isn't being captured but black doesn't have any left therefore black can't play in either of these places he would need to do two moves at once in order to capture this group but he can that means this white group is alive forever that's what we call a group being a lie because it has two eyes eyes are separate um fully connected empty spaces connected to a group such that black can't fill both of them in at the same time because as soon as he tries to put one spot in he'll just get captured and he just cannot simultaneously kill this group and that is how groups live and that is how you create groups that stay alive and that's all there is to the game white and black take turns placing these stones I've showed you how capturing works whoever has the most territory plus captures ends up winning the game so I hope this helped I hope this gave you guys a little bit about a taste of the game of Go it's extremely fun but it's frustrating so get ready to be very confused for a little bit so you might be asking where to go from here well the best thing to start doing is just play games get experience under your belt make shapes with the stones don't worry about when try to figure out how the stones sort of work together it's amazing how much your subconscious can do while you're just trying to figure something out so don't worry too much try to like get these basic Liberty concepts try to surround points of territory on if your opponent tries to cut you off from a group try to capture see what happens it's very much experimental in the beginning stages of this game when you first start to learn so a place you can do that is a place called OGS my good friends u98 he's another ghost streamer is heavily involved that's a great server a lot of beginners are looking to play 9x9 games there it's a great place to start definitely recommend sticking with 9 by 9 until you've gotten more comfortable with sort of the moves and as this video series progresses you'll sort of get a sense on how and when to start transitioning up to 13 by 13 and 19 by 19 um but that is the game and have a lot of fun that's the most important thing have fun make shapes figure it out feel like a kid just playing around in the playground for the first time you will lose a lot but you'll learn stuff and you'll be surprised how much you sort of recognize next week I will have another beginner my friend Kyle I told you about me beginning a video on here and we will sort of go through how to start actually trying to make more sense of the game once you've gone through the experimental stages or just trying to figure out how it works so that does it I hope you have a great experience of this game it's a wild ride goes one of the greatest games ever made I love it so much and I'm very glad that you're trying to learn it too so good luck I'll see you on the grid

Channel: In Sente

Views: 541,936

Rating: 4.872077 out of 5

Keywords: go, baduk, weiqi, learn to play, how to play, tutorial, beginner

Id: xMshtO8h7RU

Length: 23min 16sec (1396 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 13 2016