eric jusino

“… the world is a monster. Any three-year-old can see how unsatisfactory and clumsy is this whole business of reproducing and dying by the billions. We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet. There is not a people in the world who behaves as badly as praying mantises… [The universe] is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our skins.” – Annie Dillard

We sift through tons of information about politics, survival, and just plain handy DIY stuff and distill the bits that matter, the bits that normal people can make, do, or live in their day to day.

A guy came into the Seattle Go Center one Tuesday looking for a game. They asked the ritual question, and he answered: “About 5 dan.”

Tuesday nights are billed as beginner nights, for learners and kyu players. The manager looked around the room for a suitable opponent for an unknown 5 dan and lit on a college-looking guy I thought was a wrestler or rower. Next thing I know, they’re sitting down and the wrestler plunks down 3 stones.

I didn’t get a chance to watch; I was busy with my own game. I finished up about the same time they did.

“I swear, I used to be really good at this game. I’m so rusty. I apologize,” said the newcomer

“Well, it seems like you’re still plenty strong.”

“Maybe 4 dan, now, not 5. When we were here, I should have done…” He started rearranging the baord. I stopped tracking the conversation and started another game.

Later, when John Boy was carving up my position and eating my stones alive, I heard a cry of dismay and laughter at the next table. So much for focus. I looked over at the laughing players – the 5 dan and the wrestler. They were holding their bowls under the table.

“Do you know this variant?” John Boy asked me.

“No.”

“It’s called ‘lottery go’. Black takes a number of the white stones and mixes them into his own bowl. White does the same with black stones. When either plays he reaches blind into the bowl to play a stone. It might be white, it might be black. It introduces chance into the game.”

It leads to a whole different strategy and thought process. And a lot more laughter.

Ritual dialog at the Seattle Go Center:

“Looking for a game?”

“Yeah.”

“How strong are you?”

I’ve had or overheard this conversation too many times already, and I’ve only been to the center a few times. Players talk numbers, and I guess if they’re close enough in skill, they play.

When it’s me in the conversation, I usually explain that I’m extremely new to the game and am still playing on small boards. That’s generally enough for someone to figure out if they want to play me.

Up until recently, though, I didn’t fully understand why everyone asks.

The other day, I struck up conversation with a guy I hadn’t played before. I told him I was brand new, had only played small board games, etc. We sat down over a 13x13 board and he asked me my strength. I told him I didn’t know, but had played a total of 5 games in my life. He gave me 4 stones.

I won our first game by a large margin, but it wasn’t very fun. It didn’t feel right. Sure, I learned some things, and my opponent talked me through some blunders, but it was a really disappointing game.

I learned something: the wrong handicap, or any general mismatch of strength, makes the game less fun to play. At least for me. And I assume that since everyone asks the question, it’s that way for them, too.

John Boy hangs out most Thursdays evenings at Couth Buzzard Books/Espresso Buono. He brings go stones and boards and encourages anyone and everyone to meet him there for games. When I got there, he was waiting with a go board and a laptop, keeping up with friends far away.

“Just in time,” he said when I showed up, “you’re playing, what? 5 stones on the 13x13 board?”

So much for small talk. He quickly checked some things on his laptop while I wandered around the Buzzard, looking at books while a pro-level barista training session was going on. I half-heard the trainer talk about regulating temperature on an Italian espresso machine.

Then it was time to play, and I placed my 5 stones and we talked about 2 player games like go and capoeira, about joseki, and about how it’s always good to attack from strength. I asked lots of questions and came out a few points ahead. I still don’t get how the endgame works.

Then John Boy was greeting an arrival before he made it all the way through the door, “I have a game for you!” he said, pointing at me. I airpotted myself another half cup of coffee.

Alan started playing go “forever ago” when he got a board and the basic rules and started playing capture games. That should have been my first clue – he was telling me that he likes a fighting game.

John thought Alan and I could play an even game, but that I should play black since Alan is a little stronger than I am.

I’d been used to  teaching games with players who gave me handicaps and expected to have to help me out. In my 6 or so games, I’d always talked over things as I played.

My game with Alan wasn’t like that at all. What started as a straightforward game turned into a complicated series of small fights. It felt more like this:

I’d left a few weaknesses and Alan picked at them with zero discussion and a series of quirky shrugs. It was a quiet, intense game. It was ridiculously fun. And it was friendly. Friendly like a game of capoeira: based on give and take, plenty of room for creativity, and tiring and exhilarating at the same time.

At the beginning of the middle game, I had 2/3 of the board. By the end of the game, I managed to retain a 10 point advantage. The next time I play Alan, I’ll play white, and we’ll go from there.

3 weeks after my first games of go and a brief interlude full of Hikaru no Go, I finally got back to the Seattle Go Center for more games. A couple of big things had happened in my mind since my first visit:

• I had read enough about go to realize that I had to play more games if I was going to get any better
• I had decided to blog my progress

I got to the Center a little early, but there were already several players in the midst of games. John, who showed me around on the first day, was playing out an intense endgame with a Japanese man. John Boy was taking a couple of first timers through the standard beginner lessons.

By the way, if you’re looking to start from scratch and need a clear, brief intro, check out Way to Go, available for free online. It is a great short introduction to the fundamentals.

Brandon, a guy I’d met briefly before, offered me a game. Because of my ultra-n00b status, we played on a 13x13 board and I placed 4 stones. I won by a large margin and the game didn’t seem very fun. It was a weird lesson: too much handicap makes for an unhappy game.

We shortened the handicap to 3 stones for the next game. It was a much better match. I think Brandon won, but I was too busy learning to care much. I asked why he had made certain plays and what I could have done better, and I spent some time trying to absorb the lessons.

We grabbed a cup of tea and watched some games. Before too long, I found myself watching John Boy playing Jesse, the 7 year old who had beaten me so badly a few weeks before. They were just wrapping up their game, and John Boy had a line of learners waiting. I sat down at the 13x13 board with Jesse, ready to get schooled again.

Jesse’s heart wasn’t in the game that night. We had more fun making silly scenarios involving stones falling off cliffs, using stones as imaginary motorcycles, and playing stones into mosaic patterns on the board. We’ll have a serious game another day.

John Boy maybe wanted to make up for my complete lack of a game with Jesse, so offered me a teaching game. I started with 5 stones and he kept up a running lesson on joseki, spouted a few go proverbs, and told me about the lines of death (edge), agony (2nd line), power (3rd), and influence (4th).

Go has an incredibly rich tradition of proverbial wisdom and mnemonics for positions and good plays. Some are universally accepted. Some have local significance or variations or flavor. Most, at the moment, don’t make sense to me. But I’ll remember John Boy’s lesson of the lines and try to play accordingly.

After my game with John Boy, I played another with Brandon and lost. We ate some freshly baked bread and butter and watched a few more games before I admitted fatigue and packed up to go. Brandon shook my hand and said, “next week, I’ll be stronger.”

Next week, I, too, will be stronger. With this learning curve, how could I not be?

During my tour of the Seattle Go Center, I noticed several volumes of the manga series Hikaru no Go. I remember thinking “an entire series about go? How would that even look?”, then ordering up the entire 23 volume series at my local library.

It’s a good thing I ordered it when I did. After my first games, I missed a few weeks (got a cold, hurt my knee playing tag at my parkour gym). I mostly stayed in, with nothing to do but read Hikaru no Go, which was showing up at my local library branch at the rate of a few volumes per day.

Once I started, the only thing that stopped me reading was not having the next volume on hand. It’s a good series. Read it for yourself.

Hikaru no Go isn’t about go – not really. It’s about go players, the Japanese go scene, and Japanese culture. It’s about the players' relationships with each other, about how they push each other to succeed. It’s about how there is more to the game than the game, and about how there is more to the go scene than Japan.

Though the stories are driven by go and use some game jargon, a reader with no go experience can still get a giddy adrenal rush when Sai finally plays Toya Meijin for fittingly go-like stakes. At least I did, and I had no idea what joseki meant.

The characters that make the series. The badass characters look amazing and intense as they chase the sublime, “the divine move”. The less badass players still improve as they play. And the world of professional go in Japan comes alive right down to the shushing and clacking of go stones.

A friend of mine recently asked me If go is a cool as it looks. I wonder if he’s read HnG. Because it makes go look very cool. It’s incentive to start playing, and it’s incentive to stick with the game. Because even the most talented characters lose games, and even though Hikaru has supernatural help, it takes him 2 years of constant play to get to the bottom of the pro ranks.

The tour of the Seattle Go Center gave me time to think. The lessons that John had run me through sort of made sense to me… enough to know that I would probably understand better if I saw them at work in a real game.

Now I know why my my first attempt to learn go failed: even though I’d done lots of reading, I’d never actually played a game with anyone. Gridded diagrams, Japanese terminology, terms like “bamboo joint”, and proverbs like “there is death in the hane” (I still don’t know what that means) are cool to know, but out of the context of real games, they’re jargon.

The first game I played a small board “teaching” game with John. He kept up a running commentary good vs. bad moves, and played back through my mistakes over and over with unbelievable patience. When I came back up for air, I noticed another guy (turns out his name is John, too… he goes by “John Boy” to ease confusion) was playing 4 beginner games at once on 2 different sized boards, keeping up a stream of what sounded like helpful commentary.

One of John Boy’s proteges, 7-year old Jesse, was available for a game. He gave me a 2-stone handicap and kicked my ass twice without even breaking a sweat. Early in the first game, I told him that I was new to go, so any advice he could give me would be a big help. He began his own running commentary about eyes and ko fighting. He was more than willing to explain all of his terminology, and he had an incredible knack for creating situations in the game where he could show me what he was talking about. He’s 7.

About the time I was gathering up my stones and deciding that I needed a long break to let things soak in, the pizza showed up. Food is plentiful at the Center. They order out for pizza and sell it by the slice to hungry players. Someone bakes fresh bread in the kitchen every Tuesday evening and brings an assortment of vegetables and cold cuts for sandwiches.

I decided to nourish my poor sapped brain with bread and butter while watching some of the games going on. In the few minutes it took me to eat my chunk of bread, 3 people had introduced themselves to me and asked me if I was looking for a game. I begged off, citing cranial overload and utter n00b status. I told them I was just looking to watch for a little while. One man even took me over to a game he thought would be helpful for me to watch, explaining little bits of what was going on as I watched.

But I’d tipped into incomprehension and soon faded out to get the bus back home.

The Seattle Go Center welcomes beginning go players on Tuesday afternoons and evenings. Turns out I have Tuesdays off. So four weeks ago, I caught the 44 up to Seattle’s University District and found the Center tucked above a retail space on 45th and 7th in Seattle’s University District. It’s right at 7th and 45th, though you may not see it right away… it’s a little inconspicuous.

In case you’re biking, there’s a bike rack right inside the main entrance.

I showed up a little after 3pm, the published start time. A man named John, soft-spoken, bearded, and bespectacled, gave me the intro and showed me where to sign in. The first 10 visits are free – people usually know by then if they want to continue with go.

I told him that I knew next to nothing about go, so he started me on a tiny board and showed me the basic mechanics of the game.

I’ve read hundreds of different answers to the question “what is go?”. Most of them have one idea in common: the rules are very simple, but the complexity of the gameplay is insane. I believe it… after 30 minutes of go fundamentals, I had more questions than I could articulate.

We opted to take a break and have a look around the Center.

There’s one big main room with folding tables draped in maroon cloths. Each table hosts several boards and sets of stones. The place has a mismatched appeal, but wouldn’t dare to call itself wabi sabi. They have a tatami room with floor boards and cushions for those who like to play more traditional-feeling games.

There’s a storage room, an office, a couple of restrooms, and a kitchen area. Bread dough was rising on the main table that day, just about ready to go into the oven. Snacks are modestly priced, and you can get coffee and tea for $0.50 per bag.

Another corner of the main room has shelves lined with books and videos, much of it not in English. Some are clearly periodicals, some are full of game records, some appear to be problem sets, and some appear to be graphic novels. More on that later.

As we finished up the tour, more people began filtering into the Center for their night of play. And now that I had a wobbly grasp of the basic rules, I was ready for my first game.

“The Japanese say it takes 1,000 games to reach shodan. If that’s true then anyone can do it.” – Kaoru Iwamoto

10 years ago, I chased down go after watching Aronofsky’s Pi and spent lots of time tracking down resources and reading books about go. I picked up Kawabata’s Master of Go and Janice Kim’s Learn to Play Go series. I bought stones, bowls, and board from Samarkand.

I worked through a few lessons on my new board. I learned the basics of life and death, the ladder, the net, and the tiger’s mouth. I learned how to hold and place the stones. But I didn’t find anyone to play. After a while, I mothballed the board and stones and books. I gave all my go stuff away when I moved to Seattle.

About 2 months ago, I found the Seattle Go Center while buying cat food. I visited their beginner night and sort of remembered things I had read. A six year old kicked my ass despite my 2 stone handicap.

I figured I needed to hit the books. I spent hours finding electronic resources and an Android app that plays go. I’m realizing again that I need a set of my own to properly learn to play.

Then I grabbed Iwamoto’s Go for Beginners from the local library and pulled up short while flipping through:

“The raw beginner especially needs to play as many games as possible… Play your first few games on a small board to get the feel of the game… Play quickly. Don’t spend too long thinking out each move. At this stage you lack the experience needed to think constructively… The first twenty games or so will probably be the most confusing of your go-playing career, but once they are behind you, you can begin to concentrate on the task of improving your strength.” – Kaoru Iwamoto

Turns out, I don’t need to hit the books nearly as badly as I need to hit the board.

I’m going to play 1,000 games of go. I’m going to tell you about it.

I don’t know how detailed this blog’s going to be, or where it’s going other than game 1,000 and perhaps beyond. Come along with me and find out.