Life In 19x19

I agree with Bantari. After I had been playing on KGS for a while I started playing online chess. At first I was surprised, and slightly irritated, to find that no-one else ever said "hi", "thx" or similar (and I'm not talking about blitz games). But then I realised that, since these exchanges on ...

Go "scales" really well with a person's strength. You can have enjoyable games at 25kyu, at 10kyu, at 1 dan, at 5 dan, etc, so why the hurry? The games may be different, but are they more or less fun?
Personally I find it more fun as an SDK than I did as a DDK, because I have slightly more idea ...

I feel much the same way as entropi, except that I don't care all that much whether I win or lose: what bothers me is the constant feeling of being out of my depth, and it doesn't really help that my opponent is even more out of his/her depth than I am. This consciousness of my own ineptitude seems ...

antone wrote:I'll hide comments too to save on space.

Personally I hate hide tags, so I'm more likely to follow the game if at least the players' comments are open.

Interesting! As a weaker player I certainly crumple with fear when I see a higher rank.
Me too: my results are far better with white than with black, even though I always play with the right handicap. It would be nice to be able to ignore my opponent's rank, but it's hard (and possibly unwise) to ...

It's also large enough for comfortably reading Go pdfs (like Kiseido's Go World Archive) without zooming.
How do you get pdfs on to the iPad? Some people seem to find this difficult, and (not having an iPad) I don't really understand the workarounds that I've seen proposed. I'll probably get one ...

I found it both absorbing and educational - and it's not easy to be both. I'm sure I followed even less of the reading sequences than many others did, but that didn't me bother much: what is really helpful at my level (about 10k) is to see the sort of thing that a strong player thinks about, rather ...

It's fascinating, yes, and I suspect that a lot of people keep playing because they're fascinated rather than because they're having a lot of fun. Chess is fun even if you've only just learned the rules; at that level, Go is just bewildering and frustrating. My own theory is that chess becomes less ...

If you're a bad chess player, it's not so hard to find opponents near your level. I doubt I'm more than 20 kyu in chess, but four out of five times I play an aquaintance, I have the advantage. For Go, it's not so easy. It can be a really dispiriting realization that you'll have to take 9 stones ...