Robert Terry on "Why Go has Failed to Prosper in the US"

[ez4u]

His history lesson is interesting. After thirty-one years in existence the American Chess Foundation (nothing to do with the USCF of course) was down to one employee in Flushing. However it jumped on the Chess in Schools bandwagon (apparently created by the FIDE in 1984) and never looked back. This year the EU officially endorsed the CIS program for European schools by the way. So Bob wants to blame amateur Go players in the U.S. for... what, exactly? Playing the wrong game perhaps?

I also found his bit about Broadway baffling. Given the nature of his blog posts, isn't the Go equivalent of the despicable, second-rate theater critics, er... Bob Terry?

[EdLee]

The point is that some of the go organizers do frequent L19 and they should hear about criticism from people who have provided such services for the community.

Yes.

That was just what I thought after reading this bit:

No need to be sorry; I just thought he did not say one has to be "very good" at Go to promote it well.
I hope you feel much better soon.

Yes, the article "Why Go has Failed to Prosper in the US" is a bit bizarre -- "failed at life" is too much.
However, and once again I may be among the minority here, I share some of his sentiments
and I find some of his observations and criticisms very accurate in his other blogs,
"How NOT to Promote Go in the US" and "Time for Go to Grow Up."

[Inkwolf]

I think the real problem with the spread of Go is that nobody has heard of it, and many of those who have think it's the province of math professors, geniuses, geeks and Asians. They see it in A Beautiful Mind, or read things like Sarah Paretsky's The Takamoku Joseki, neither of which have much about the actual game or make it look fun to play. Hikaru No Go has done more to spread knowledge of Go than anything in the US, but again, that's a manga and anime, which attracts a niche audience. Whatever the AGA does about tournaments and events, most people will just say, "Go? Never heard of it." and go on with their lives.

Go needs to go mainstream in a way people will notice. My suggestion: try to get them to do an episode of Big Bang Theory where Sheldon enters a Go tournament. There is way more than enough cliquish nerdiness associated with Go to make it a natural for the show, and to provide fuel for all sorts of comedy.

And here's another thing that ought to be done to make Go more popular: get someone to crank out some dirt-cheap full-size go sets that can be sold in toy and department stores. Imagine you're a parent wandering around an actual store looking for a game that might get your kids to think. You can grab a chess or checkers set for $10 at the local Walmart, with a cardboard board and junky plastic pieces. If you're in a big enough city that they even HAVE a go set, even if you've ever HEARD of it, you're probably looking at spending at the very least $30. Which would you spend on an impulse purchase, not knowing whether your kids will even bother to play it? IMO, people are much more willing to try something on the cheap, and if they like it enough, they are willing afterward to upgrade to a better quality set.

[hyperpape]

Yes, the article "Why Go has Failed to Prosper in the US" is a bit bizarre -- "failed at life" is too much.
However, and once again I may be among the minority here, I share some of his sentiments
and I find some of his observations and criticisms very accurate in his other blogs,
"How NOT to Promote Go in the US" and "Time for Go to Grow Up."

I doubt that you're in the minority in sharing some of his sentiments. I think organized Go in the US is hardly in great shape. My question would be: what does Mr. Terry teach us about the causes or solutions to that problem, or even help us describe the scope of the problem?

[Kaya.gs]

The articles are pretty grim. They feel like a disguised rant.

However, i do believe we should look at chess and poker to learn how they spread. Saying "chess is successful because people know what it is" is precisely what we have to learn from.

Chess was unknown at some point, so how to get it to be known. The only way to create a really expansive community is to have a defined strategy for it and doing it so. There was an AGA comission looking into it, they seemed to be on the right track, and were looking for funding.

Having the first professionals is an important landmark, and there should be a joint effort into building a gigantic sport. Its for sure possible, if there are world competitions of cup-stacking, why cant Go get more known.

[jts]

Problem: at the point at which Chess was introduced to the Western world, it was every bit as niche - if not more so - than Go. I'm fairly certain the Western world currently has more games of Go in a week than it had games of chess in a year, if not a decade, c. 1000. However, no one thinks a viable strategy for Western Go is "wait another eight hundred years to become deeply entrenched among the intellectual and political elite, latch its tentacles into the world of gambling, find a comfortable place in the cultural vocabulary of the literati, and then expand quickly to the masses during a period of social mobility." Unless you're willing to take the long view, please don't make analogies to games like chess or poker that took centuries to get established in different forms before a variant of the original game became popular...

A game like basketball might be a better bet. Basketball was apparently reconstructed on the basis of a description of ancient Central American ball games, and had absolutely no prior history in Western culture. The key point is that it was specifically chosen as a game that might be able to keep juvenile delinquents busy, and it arose at a time of anxiety about the physical degeneration of slum dwellers, and thus the rise of theories of physical education. For both of these reasons, the concept of basketball actively spread among gym teachers, social reformers, and drill sergeants, who inflicted it on their institutions (schools, community centers, the US Army) as a way to accomplish those social goals. Voila, modern basketball goes from 0 to 60 in three short decades.

[Tofu]

Mr Terry kicks the AGA instead of giving constructive criticism. He is doing more to hurt Go than help it with these articles. If he wants to help promote Go, he should be telling us his opinions on what can be done better and how.

At the end of the day what he accomplishes is making himself appear pathetic, angry, and petty.

[Bartleby]

I am both a chess player and a go player. They are both great games, and I don't personally think there are any objective reasons to prefer one over the other. So the question is why chess is so much more popular in the West?

I think it's mostly cultural. Chess has been played in the West for many centuries. It has built up a rich history and literature that is accessible to Westerners. It has - correctly or incorrectly - been associated with intellectual superiority. It benefited (hugely) from the political circus surrounding the Fischer-Spassky match, in which chessplayers became proxies for their Cold War nations.

As a game, I like Go just as much as I like chess. But I play and spectate chess much more because for me - a non-CJK-speaking westerner - the culture that I have access to is infinitely richer. I can watch international chess tournaments live on the Internet Chess Club while hearing top grandmasters comment on the moves in English; the vast majority of chess books published today are written in English, and i can read any of them I want; there are some really excellent chess magazines written in English; I can travel to any city of decent size in the U.S. and find strong players to play against.

I also think that there is an issue of openness. A lot of young people who learn to play chess or Go are motivated, in part, by a dream of becoming a top player, a professional. Chess is one of the last pure meritocracies: if you are good enough, no matter how you got what way, where you are from, how old you are, or what your background is, you can become a Grandmaster and maybe even World Champion. The only thing you have to be able to do is to win games. Professional Go has much more limited access and the few routes to becoming a professional player tend to more time-sensitive. So fewer people (especially in the West) can chase the dream of being a professional.

Once again, I don't think chess is superior to Go. But for Westerners, chess has so many built-in advantages that I'm not sure Go has a realistic chance of ever being as popular in the West.

[Neutron]

Mr Terry kicks the AGA instead of giving constructive criticism. He is doing more to hurt Go than help it with these articles. If he wants to help promote Go, he should be telling us his opinions on what can be done better and how.

At the end of the day what he accomplishes is making himself appear pathetic, angry, and petty.

It has been observed more than a few times that when "the go organizers" recieve any kind of criticism, constructive or otherwise, they immediately act as if they are being personally attacked. Most times, the only people who are well recieved are the ones who are blind to "the go organizers" faults. These are not blanket statements though, there are always exceptions and circumstantial stuff going on.

Who wants to try to give criticisms when The Ultra Defense Team immediately jumps down your throat for daring to question the status quo?

The reason Terry can do it and get away with it is because 1) He has personally contributed to the growth of Go, and 2) He has his own pedestal and following that is outside of "the go organizations" influence.

Just my 2 cents

[Tofu]

It has been observed more than a few times that when "the go organizers" recieve any kind of criticism, constructive or otherwise, they immediately act as if they are being personally attacked. Most times, the only people who are well recieved are the ones who are blind to "the go organizers" faults. These are not blanket statements though, there are always exceptions and circumstantial stuff going on.

Who wants to try to give criticisms when The Ultra Defense Team immediately jumps down your throat for daring to question the status quo?

The reason Terry can do it and get away with it is because 1) He has personally contributed to the growth of Go, and 2) He has his own pedestal and following that is outside of "the go organizations" influence.

Just my 2 cents

How does ranting help promote go? I agree that the go establishment can get pretty defensive at times. I'm not sure how that excuses Mr Terry's behavior.

We shouldn't let Terry "get away with it" when he makes a fool of himself and the community. I'm grateful toward Terry for writing books and helping to promote go in the past, but now his behavior is potentially hurting the game's growth. He should either say something meaningful, or not say anything at all.

[lemmata]

There is a nicely formatted spreadsheet floating around the internets somewhere, but for now, let's consider the 2002 and 2008 annual reports.

• 810 total members in 1985-86.
• 1350 in 1990-1991.
• 2400 in 2008.

Membership is down since that peak, but I don't know the numbers. Off the top of my head, I want to say that membership is now at roughly the levels it was ten years ago, but I can't recall for sure. If so, Mr. Terry is off by more a factor of three.

Thanks for doing the digging. However, while it is clear that Mr. Terry engaged in hyperbole, the actual numbers shown above are quite depressing. Adding only 1600 members in 25 years is pretty pathetic when no qualifications are needed to join the AGA.

Then again, a lot of people do agree that things are not going all that well. The personal attacks by Terry were certainly unnecessary.

[hyperpape]

Terry referred to the majority of go organizers in the US as "failures at life". Unless someone a) challenges him to a duel or b) starts saying "we know were you live" to him, I'm going to regard any response I see as a measured and appropriate reaction.

[gowan]

I don't think you can get very many people to become ardent go players by telling everyone that this is a great game and they should all play it. I was a chess player in the pre-Bobby Fischer era, before I was a go player. Back then people knew about chess and there were chess clubs at high schools and in cities and towns At that time there were tournaments in the USA and master level players but very few grandmasters and almost no one competitive on a world champion level. The Elo rating system dates to that time. It really was not possible to make a living as a chess player. There were "chess bums" who hung out at chess clubs in major cities and played people in blitz games for money. Then came Bobby Fischer who first was a child prodigy and second became competitive with the Soviet grandmasters, eventually winning the world championship. Because of this cold war coup chess became respectable and much more popular. This part of the story we all know.

What is interesting to me is not the Fischer phenomenon but the fact that chess was already well known in the USA a hundred years before Fischer was born. Chess was known in Europe for hundreds of years, long before there even was a USA. When chess started in Europe the pieces represented things from everyday life: kings, queens, bishops knights, castles, peons (pawns). This may have made the game more relevant to people. But it is worth noting that chess has a several hundred year long history in the West up to the present. Go has, perhaps, a 120 year history in the West. And the go pieces (stones) are abstract, with no immediate connection to everyday life. In the Orient the game has over 2000 years of history. In those 2000 years what levels of popularity did the game achieve? We know about the support of the Shogunate government in Japan, but maybe the go-playing population in the country as a whole was not that great. Thanks to the promotion by the newspapers and the Nihon Ki-in, it could be that go reached the height of its popularity in Japan only 50 or 60 years ago and it has been declining in recent years. My question is how reasonable is it to expect a huge upswing in popularity?

[jts]

However, while it is clear that Mr. Terry engaged in hyperbole, the actual numbers shown above are quite depressing. Adding only 1600 members in 25 years is pretty pathetic when no qualifications are needed to join the AGA.

orrrr, you could say that tripling the membership is pretty good, when the aga has lost it's monopoly over mainstream american go.

[lemmata]

However, while it is clear that Mr. Terry engaged in hyperbole, the actual numbers shown above are quite depressing. Adding only 1600 members in 25 years is pretty pathetic when no qualifications are needed to join the AGA.

orrrr, you could say that tripling the membership is pretty good, when the aga has lost it's monopoly over mainstream american go.

That is one way to sugarcoat it. Tripling a small number over a quarter century is not really an achievement at all. I am a little confused by the monopoly comment. The AGA really isn't selling anything and there is no other go organization that is competing with the AGA for members. Of course, playing online has reduced the relative value of tournaments as places to find games, but organizing tournaments is not the raison d'etre of the AGA. I figured that organizing tournaments was just one of the methods that served the AGA's larger goals in the past.

Then again, I don't give them any money so I have no reason to get mad at what they do or don't do. Perhaps the AGA has other goals that they are achieving. However, if increasing membership is among their top goals, then those who are contributing to the AGA budget should be pretty unhappy about the result.