Back from a two-day-convention where our Go club had a stand to promote this wonderful game and I must say, it was a blast! I wouldn't have thought that there is such an enormous potential of people wanting to know about and more importantly play this game. At least if you take people interested in japanese or asian culture since this was a Anime-, Manga-, Cosplay-convention ^^
I think our biggest success was that people, who came on Saturday and learnt the game, started showing up on Sunday, too, to just play a game or two with their friends (even started to teach their friends the game on their own).
But we weren't short of learning experiences as well. I never tried to systematically teach Go to someone as short and understandable as possible, so I prepared a handout with the basic rules and just went with it.
What became obvious quite fast was that there were difficulties counting liberties when stones were connected diagonally. Although the stones were connected in the sense that the opponent could not cut through, in terms of liberties they still count seperately.
The concept of "eyes" was troublesome, too, but we expected as much. We noticed, though, that new players started to recreate the shape, we presented as alive, in their games to the point that they repeatedly played inside their territory to form "eyes". We tried not to use the word "eye" or "eyes" and just explained a living group via the suicide-rule, so stones live when they have two spaces where the opponent is not allowed to put a stone into. Sounded akward every time but at least it was easily understood =)
To improve on that misconception that the players had to recreate this one alive-shape, we just showed multiple possibilities of living groups. Got much better afterwards : )
The third learning experiences was the complete banishment of Atari-Go. It's true the players learn to care for their stones but ultimately they start doing nothing else except trying to capture stones and take away liberties of groups with 10+ of these (always with the explanation that when the other players doesn't see it, they can capture it in the end ^^) even when they don't play Atari-Go.
We also refrained from explaining capturing techniques like the ladder or the net in the beginning because of this. When they played a couple of games and such a shape came up, we tried to lead them by asking if it was possible to capture this one stone / these stones for sure.
In the end we gave away 32 printable Go sets from gogameguru.com (
http://gogameguru.com/instant-go-set/) and even more handouts with the rules and useful links on it.
Aji's Quest (
http://home.earthlink.net/~inkwolf/Inkw ... Quest.html) also sparked some interest.
Now we are thrilled to see how many newly acquainted players will come to our club meetings =)
: D
And today is quite likely the same, with the addition that I have NGA game and NGA lecture (so already booked a chunk of the day for go) 
