I was a regular at the Santa Monica Chess Club in my senior year of high school. One evening I noticed
a few men playing what looked like checkers — simple stones on a grid. I wandered over and, with the
confidence of someone who didn't know what he was looking at, said it seemed like a simple game.
One of the players, Dr. George Acton — a pathologist from Louisiana with a mind that ranged far outside
medicine — offered to teach me. Within an hour I understood I had it exactly backwards. Go is more
complex than chess, perhaps by an order of magnitude. I was hooked for life.
Go is approximately 2,500 years old, originating in China and refined across centuries in China, Japan,
and Korea into one of the most studied strategic games in human history. The rules fit in a sentence.
The strategy fills libraries.
The basic rule: place a stone on any empty intersection; a group of stones with no empty adjacent
intersections (liberties) is captured and removed. That's it. From this, an entire universe of
positional strategy, sacrifice, territory, and timing emerges — none of it derivable from the rule
itself, all of it discovered by playing.
Why Go, Not Chess
Chess is a game of direct confrontation — the pieces have known values, the tactics are largely
calculable, and the endgame tends toward clarity. Go is a game of coexistence and enclosure. Territory
matters more than capture. A group that looks strong can be dead. A position that looks lost can be
rescued. The whole board is always in play, simultaneously.
For decades, Go was considered the last major game beyond the reach of artificial intelligence —
its branching factor is too high for brute-force search, and the evaluation of positions resists simple
heuristics. When DeepMind's AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol in 2016, it didn't do it by being better at
chess-style calculation. It did it by pattern recognition at a scale and depth no human can match.
Move 37 in Game 2 — a move Sedol initially thought was a mistake — is now considered one of the
most creative moves ever played. The machine had found something genuinely new.
What It Teaches
Whole-board thinking
Local advantage is real, but it can be a trap. The player who wins is usually the one who maintained
perspective on the whole board while their opponent was absorbed in a local fight.
Life and death
Every group must have two "eyes" — internal liberties — to be alive. A group without two eyes is dead,
even if it doesn't know it yet. The metaphor is uncomfortable and accurate.
Sente and gote
Sente: a move your opponent must answer, preserving your initiative. Gote: a move that surrenders it.
The art is knowing which is which, and when surrendering initiative is actually the stronger play.
Patience as strategy
Go games can run to 200 moves or more — roughly five times a typical chess game. Mistakes made in
the opening determine outcomes only visible many moves later. The game rewards a kind of patience
that feels almost contemplative — which may be why Zen practitioners took to it so naturally.
The Zen Connection
The overlap between Go culture and Zen practice is not accidental. Both reward presence — not
the anxious calculation of future possibilities, but clear attention to what is actually on the board
right now. Both tolerate ambiguity that would be intolerable in most Western games. Both involve
learning to sit with not-knowing, which turns out to be where most of the real moves live.
Go has been part of my life for fifty years. The game has no ceiling — which is part of what makes
it a reliable companion for a lifetime of practice.
Books Worth Reading
The Master of Go
Yasunari Kawabata · 1954
Nobel laureate Kawabata witnessed a historic 1938 match and turned it into a novel. The most beautiful thing written about Go — and about tradition meeting change.
Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go
Toshiro Kageyama · 1978
The classic instruction text. Kageyama is unsparing — his philosophy is that amateurs lose not from ignorance of advanced technique but from failure to apply fundamentals.
The Game of Go
Arthur Smith · 1908
The first serious Western treatment of Go. Dated in places, charming throughout. A piece of history as much as an instruction manual.
Invincible: The Games of Shusaku
John Power · 1982
Honinbo Shusaku (1829–1862) is considered one of the greatest players in history. His games are still studied. This is the canonical collection.
Playing and Learning Online
Where to play
Online Go Server (OGS)
The best free platform for correspondence and live Go. Excellent interface, all skill levels. Where most Western players play now.
online-go.com →
Sensei's Library
The definitive wiki for Go — rules, strategy, history, terminology, joseki. If you want to know something about Go, it's probably here.
senseis.xmp.net →
Interactive Way to Go
The best free interactive introduction for complete beginners. Teaches the rules through play, not explanation.
gochild.com →
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