Life In 19x19

Hi, I can't understand the phrase "take 5 stones from..." Does that mean that you are playing white and the AI has a five-stone handicap? (So you would "take" the deficit from them on the way to winning.)

Or does it mean you are playing black and starting with 5 stones on the board (so you are ...

I challenged LibertyBot again after my last match - all the comments must have helped! I won my "revenge match" convincingly, and KGS now has me ranked at 15 kyu. My rank seems really inflated to me, of course - I'm still regularly getting stumped on 20-kyu level go problems. But this game was ...

As a beginner it strikes me that there are a lot of life lessons in Go - tenuki can be sort of like not getting caught up in petty disagreements, maintaining perspective, etc. Just wondering what kind of impact the game has had on others, particularly those that have played for a while and are ...

A few days ago I was able to beat GnuGo on 19x19, at a 9-stone handicap, for the first time. So tonight I tried to play with an 8-stone handicap and lost. This is the game - I ran the record back through GnuGo afterward to see where GnuGo would have moved as black, and those moves are in the ...

Wow Elom, those are great comments, thanks! Some of it is beyond me and I'll be busy looking up some definitions now. Definitely saving this to review a few times over the next little while.

Thanks S2W! I appreciate the comments.

Yeah, it looks like a lot of my loss was due to moves like and and W-158 and W-172. These are the sorts of moves I currently expect myself to recognize and I just didn't. I think I was feeling a bit jackrabbity because I was playing a 16kyu at zero handicap ...

To celebrate beating GnuGo at 19x19 (with 9 stones handicap), I thought I should try to get a ranking on KGS. After first playing a human (my first go server human!) and winning by resignation when I thought I was on the way to losing, I realized it was a "Free" game and didn't count for my rankings ...

I tried installing fuego via homebrew on the mac a few weeks ago and it didn't work, so I filed a bug report with the homebrew people, and they pushed out the updated recipe a couple of days ago.

'brew install fuego' worked great, and I was able to play a game against it using GoGui. Just fyi in ...

Creating a study journal sounds like fun.

I've posted once so far, over in Amateurs: http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=11490

I am a complete beginner, and seem to be hanging out in the 20kyu range lately.

Since then, I attended the Seattle Go Center once - the lecture was a ...

After 2-3 false starts over the past many years, I think I've finally been stricken with the bug. I think one of the most fun parts about being a beginner is figuring out all the tools and toys to use to be able to study a bit of Go at any time. Here's what I'm doing these days.

1) Study: I have ...