Recently, I was eating lunch with my sister at a local Chinese place, trying to explain Go to her--the rules, its history and other random bits I'd picked up here and there. One of the owners, or a relative of the owner (a middle aged Chinese woman), approached me and asked if I was talking about Weiqi, how long I'd played, how I heard about it, what level I played at. After a few minutes she thanked me and excused herself and we eventually paid our bill and left.
I was thinking about that this morning and I came to the conclusion that if I want any kind of Go community to come up around here, I'll probably have to be the one to get it started. I managed to get one of my cousins and a friend of his playing a few games with me and I let them borrow my board and stones. They're young, little sheep who like to do things for appearances' sake (gotta look cool in front of my friends, man!
). I workin' my older cousin magic here to get them interested. I've begun putting a flyer together and plan to leave a bunch around town. I'm planning to target cafes, what Chinese, Korean, and Japanese places will let me leave them there (the place I went to with my sister had business cards and flyers littering a table in the office area), and the Math, Physics, and Computer Science Departments at the local University and Community colleges.What advice do any of you have to give concerning starting and, hopefully in the future, running a go club? What am I not thinking about?
That Chinese place isn't open after mid-afternoon, I think. So today when I print out some flyers I'm gonna go out and scout some cafes to see if they'll let us meet there on certain evenings.
I read somewhere on here about motivating new players; taking a genuine interest in them as people does seem the best way. I plan to take the time to do just that, but since I'm just a sad beginner myself (I just broke 15k on IGS yesterday), I'm worried I won't be able to give them a solid grounding in the game.
