What is your club's culture like?
Posted: Wed Jan 29, 2014 3:30 pm
I want to hear about what go clubs are like around the world. Post about what your club is like. If you want to just give a basic list of the player ranks and the name of the location that's good. If you want to take the time to describe a club meeting in detail I'd love to read about it. I'm trying to get a feel for what the clubs I attend could be doing differently or what I might expect if I ever venture to another club elsewhere in the world.
Feel free to share anything and everything about your club.
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I attend two clubs. The West Michigan Go Club and the Grand Valley Go and Chess Club.
The West Michigan Go Club is AGA approved and meets once a week on Tuesday evenings. We meet in a local grocery store on the upper east side of Grand Rapids. There is a small eating area near the deli and Starbucks mostly used by employees on lunch break. We pull together two or three tables and sometimes have a small 8 1/2 x 11" sign in one of those plastic upright cases that we put out to let people know who we are. We do have 3 club boards purchased from a local Korean store. They are simple folding boards with medium sized stones. Usually we play on the boards our members bring with them. We have never used clocks.
Our president founded the club because the Grand Rapids Go Club was no longer meeting. He has night classes recently so isn't able to attend as often as he would like. When we meet there are usually around 3-4 players. On some nights there are only 2. One week only one member showed up. Once there was 10 - that was our highest attended week. Last week, by some miracle, we had 8. Our strongest players are 2-4 kyu. We have never had more than three high SDK players in a single week. Our weakest regularly attending player is around 18 kyu. Few of these ranks are based on the AGA, most are guesses because tournaments are so rare in the area. We have sometimes taught new players, but usually it is just a few of us meeting to play games with our regular handicaps against one another.
The Grand Valley Go and Chess Club is an official student organization at Grand Valley State University. It is neither AGA nor USCF certified. It was once simply a go club, but when the chess club folded three years ago we took in their remaining 2 members, both of whom already attended our club. That first year as a dual-game club we only played chess on one meeting day. We were still very much a go club. That changed the next year. Our meeting location is the South Lounge of the student center. It is a moderate sized room with tables and chairs for lounging and studying. We usually take one of the long tables and set up games on that. Sometimes we will go to a different venue for another student organization to share our games, like when we attended a Japanese Culture Association event to teach go and shogi. Sometimes a school event will force us to a small room off to the side of our usual meeting space.
Last year we got much more serious as an organization. Not only did we begin playing chess more, we hosted our first Chess Tournament in April of 2013 and got school funding to purchase tournament chess boards and clocks. This year we used club funds to also purchase some go boards, a couple of shogi sets, and a xiangqi set. As a result of these purchases our games now look much nicer. We get a lot of comments from students passing by about our go games because the solid bamboo boards and yunzi stones make the game look more interesting. Our club meets twice a week. The first meeting of the week's time will vary from semester to semester, the second meeting is always on Friday at 5pm. The Friday meeting space and time is shared by another gaming organization on campus called "Alternate Realities" that plays a wide range fantasy games and role playing games including Magic and D&D. We have yet to host a go tournament for fear that we would only be playing amongst ourselves.
We usually get 4-6 people attending our meetings. Two of them are not very serious players. They mostly come to socialize and will play games here and there but don't try too hard. One of us is quite interested in western chess. He has risen rapidly in strength through study, becoming our strongest chess player after being beaten regularly by other members last year. He insists on playing with a clock and only plays 5 minute blitz games. He is the only member that uses a clock for his games. The other three, myself included, play all of the games. Two of us are most interested in go. One is most interested in shogi. We also get a member of the West Michigan Go Club to come out once a week. Our best meeting attendance was around 14 people for one of our chess tournaments. Our best meeting for go was when we had members of the West Michigan Go Club come out to a Tuesday meeting for the first time. That week we had 7 go players. When the club was just a go club we had some weeks with 6 players. On bad days it is just 2 of us. I don't recall ever having a meeting with just one member showing up.
Feel free to share anything and everything about your club.
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I attend two clubs. The West Michigan Go Club and the Grand Valley Go and Chess Club.
The West Michigan Go Club is AGA approved and meets once a week on Tuesday evenings. We meet in a local grocery store on the upper east side of Grand Rapids. There is a small eating area near the deli and Starbucks mostly used by employees on lunch break. We pull together two or three tables and sometimes have a small 8 1/2 x 11" sign in one of those plastic upright cases that we put out to let people know who we are. We do have 3 club boards purchased from a local Korean store. They are simple folding boards with medium sized stones. Usually we play on the boards our members bring with them. We have never used clocks.
Our president founded the club because the Grand Rapids Go Club was no longer meeting. He has night classes recently so isn't able to attend as often as he would like. When we meet there are usually around 3-4 players. On some nights there are only 2. One week only one member showed up. Once there was 10 - that was our highest attended week. Last week, by some miracle, we had 8. Our strongest players are 2-4 kyu. We have never had more than three high SDK players in a single week. Our weakest regularly attending player is around 18 kyu. Few of these ranks are based on the AGA, most are guesses because tournaments are so rare in the area. We have sometimes taught new players, but usually it is just a few of us meeting to play games with our regular handicaps against one another.
The Grand Valley Go and Chess Club is an official student organization at Grand Valley State University. It is neither AGA nor USCF certified. It was once simply a go club, but when the chess club folded three years ago we took in their remaining 2 members, both of whom already attended our club. That first year as a dual-game club we only played chess on one meeting day. We were still very much a go club. That changed the next year. Our meeting location is the South Lounge of the student center. It is a moderate sized room with tables and chairs for lounging and studying. We usually take one of the long tables and set up games on that. Sometimes we will go to a different venue for another student organization to share our games, like when we attended a Japanese Culture Association event to teach go and shogi. Sometimes a school event will force us to a small room off to the side of our usual meeting space.
Last year we got much more serious as an organization. Not only did we begin playing chess more, we hosted our first Chess Tournament in April of 2013 and got school funding to purchase tournament chess boards and clocks. This year we used club funds to also purchase some go boards, a couple of shogi sets, and a xiangqi set. As a result of these purchases our games now look much nicer. We get a lot of comments from students passing by about our go games because the solid bamboo boards and yunzi stones make the game look more interesting. Our club meets twice a week. The first meeting of the week's time will vary from semester to semester, the second meeting is always on Friday at 5pm. The Friday meeting space and time is shared by another gaming organization on campus called "Alternate Realities" that plays a wide range fantasy games and role playing games including Magic and D&D. We have yet to host a go tournament for fear that we would only be playing amongst ourselves.
We usually get 4-6 people attending our meetings. Two of them are not very serious players. They mostly come to socialize and will play games here and there but don't try too hard. One of us is quite interested in western chess. He has risen rapidly in strength through study, becoming our strongest chess player after being beaten regularly by other members last year. He insists on playing with a clock and only plays 5 minute blitz games. He is the only member that uses a clock for his games. The other three, myself included, play all of the games. Two of us are most interested in go. One is most interested in shogi. We also get a member of the West Michigan Go Club to come out once a week. Our best meeting attendance was around 14 people for one of our chess tournaments. Our best meeting for go was when we had members of the West Michigan Go Club come out to a Tuesday meeting for the first time. That week we had 7 go players. When the club was just a go club we had some weeks with 6 players. On bad days it is just 2 of us. I don't recall ever having a meeting with just one member showing up.
