{"id":23,"date":"2007-10-25T01:16:39","date_gmt":"2007-10-25T01:16:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/2007\/10\/25\/teaching_me_go\/"},"modified":"2018-01-05T03:05:39","modified_gmt":"2018-01-05T03:05:39","slug":"teaching_me_go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/2007\/10\/25\/teaching_me_go\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching me Go"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dobe asked about Peter and games. I have a couple of things to say in that area, but I’ll start with this one.<\/p>\n

Peter taught me to play Go when I was a kid. The way he taught me went kind of like this:<\/p>\n

He would play a stone.<\/p>\n

I would look at the board and not know what to do.<\/p>\n

He would tell me where the best place to play was.<\/p>\n

I would play there.<\/p>\n

He would then make a better play of his own that cancelled or countered the play I had just made.<\/p>\n

After several repetitions of this, it began to feel to me like (a) he was really just playing himself, while I watched (I wasn’t really participating); and (b) the moves he was telling me to make were only leading me into trouble.<\/p>\n

I’m sure none of that was intentional on Peter’s part; he was trying to share this wonderful game with me. Not his fault that his approach to teaching it to me pushed some of my buttons.<\/p>\n

But I never really got into Go. Even though several of my friends have gotten into it over the years.<\/p>\n

I was pleased recently to pick up a Go book belonging to someone or other (Kevin, maybe?) and to be able to follow it; it was a detailed introduction to liberties<\/a> and how to tell whether a group is alive or dead, and it made a lot more sense to me than it did when I was a kid. (My feeling as a kid was that Peter would point to a group of stones and tell me “Those are dead,” and I could never understand how he knew that; it always seemed kind of mystical and vague to me.)<\/p>\n

Still, the traditional boardgames (chess, Go, Othello, checkers, etc) were never my strong suit, and knowing that I could study my whole life and still never be all that good made me more or less uninterested in playing Go.<\/p>\n

But I know it was always one of Peter’s great loves.<\/p>\n

What ended up happening to Peter’s big solid wooden Go board? Do I have it in the garage? Dobe, did you end up with it? I hope it’s somewhere where it’ll be used.<\/p>\n

…At some future point I’ll write about pinochle and\/or poker. But not tonight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dobe asked about Peter and games. I have a couple of things to say in that area, but I’ll start with this one. Peter taught me to play Go when I was a kid. The way he taught me went kind of like this: He would play a stone. I would look at the board […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games-peter-played"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":125,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions\/125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}