Go Fundamentals: Everything You Need to Know to Play and Win Asian's Most Popular Game of Martial Strategy
By Shigemi Kishikawa and John Fairbairn
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About this ebook
Go is a game played by two contestants. The game is played with black and white "stones" on a checkered board. The players are usually classed as strong and weak, based upon degree of knowledge and skill. The stronger player takes the white stones and the weaker player takes the black stones. Handicaps are given to the weaker players by mutual agreement before commencement of the game. The game of Go may be one of the most difficult to learn, but this fact makes the game highly interesting. Once techniques are mastered, the beginner will find it difficult to put the game aside.
From the basic rules of play, the author leads beginner-level players in easy stages to the more advanced techniques and strategies of gameplay. Over one hundred diagrams, with twenty problems and answers, a glossary of terms as well as other resources for strategy, make this a complete introduction to one of the most fascinating and rewarding games in the world.
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Book preview
Go Fundamentals - Shigemi Kishikawa
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1 Equipment
Chapter 2 The Game
Chapter 3 Territory
Chapter 4 Connection and Disconnection
Chapter 5 Capture
Chapter 6 Life and Death
Chapter 7 Illegal Plays
Chapter 8 Seki Situation
Chapter 9 Ko Situation
Chapter 10 Basic Tactics
Chapter 11 Playing the Game
Problems
Solutions
The End of the Game
Foreword
The first substantive knowledge of the Chinese game of go in the in the western world dates from 1687, when the young Chinese scholar Shen Fuzong explained the game to Thomas Hyde at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England. Shen, brought to Europe by a Jesuit missionary, had already been paraded at the Versailles court where the Sun King Louis requested a demonstration of chopsticks—but on gold plates, naturally.
Although Hyde was alert to the merits of the game and wrote about it, he clearly had only a fuzzy grasp of it, and go caught on in Europe no more than did chopsticks.
It was not until the self-imposed isolation of Japan was breached by Commodore Perry’s black ships
in the mid 19th century and westerners began flocking there that its devotees learned enough to play an actual game and to teach others. Go had reached Japan from China over a thousand years before, and had been developed into its national game.
A tiny handful of westerners even became tolerably proficient. The most notable was the chemist Oskar Korschelt, who studied at the school of the top player, Honinbo Shuho. He got to within a six-stone handicap of Shuho. On his return to Germany, Korschelt, who found exceptional pleasure
in studying Shuho’s openings, shared his delight on the game with his 1884 work Das Go
-Spiel. In itself, this was probably the single most important work that introduced the game to the west, but it had added importance in that it was heavily used by Arthur Smith for his Game of Go. This latter work had the advantage of being in English and published (by Tuttle, be it noted) in the large market of America.
Smith’s book was the one I learned from, also with exceptional pleasure. It is still a worthy book, but dated. It is not just that the references to players and openings are out of date, but that the rules are now a little different.
Despite all the merits of the Korschelt and Smith books, the plain fact was that in their heyday go was still a fringe activity in the west. There were a few clubs, but next to no materials for teaching beyond the beginner stage, and for most players just getting equipment to play on was a major problem. Many players of my generation, myself included, began by using makeshift boards with confectionary or drawing pins for the pieces.
The transition to the modern position of the game, where go is played widely outside the Far East, with a massive number of clubs and tournaments, well over 200 non-beginner books in English and a profusion of cheap equipment, did not begin until around 1960.
The first edition of this book, then called Stepping Stones to Go, was an important part of that movement.
Buoyed up by its people’s spectacular post-war economic recovery, the Japanese government began a concerted campaign of garnering goodwill overseas. Go was part of the drive. The go professionals’ organisation, the Nihon Ki-in, was encouraged to start a magazine in English, to send professionals abroad to teach, and to hold international tournaments for amateurs. Many Japanese amateurs such as Kishikawa also made strenuous efforts to share their beloved game with new western friends.
The movement was so successful that nowadays go is no longer seen as a strange game in the west. Figures are loosely bandied around but the most conservative claim is that there are about 27 million regular players in the world with about 5 million of those outside the