Shugyosha plays an excellent game

I lost my 19x19 game with Shugyosha (BC) on IGS; but it was a wonderful game to lose. I lost by 2.5 moku because I failed to close a weak spot in my lower-right corner.


I edited the SGF with comments, and questions, and then e-mailed it to The Go Teaching Ladder for a review.

Chiyo-chan plays her first 19x19 game and beats me

Chiyo-chan (my daughter) studied on the Interactive Way to Go last night and played a 19x19 game against me. She won and this is how the board looked after we filled-in the captured pieces and moved the stones to the edges of their borders.

Goban from Yutopian

Received my Korean-made magnetic goban from Yutopian. With this model, each stone's magnet is sandwiched between two identical plastic halves so you have a whole stone. This means that you don't have to flip the stone to have its magnet-side down on the board (unlike other models I have seen sold on eBay).

The price is about the same as the smaller Japanese-made version sold at Kinokuniya Bookstore in San Francisco.

The stones rattled in the plastic case so I bought some black felt, with adhesive backing, from Michael's and lined the insides of the drawers. It quieted the stones considerably and gave the goban a classier look and feel.

Cheap go set for 9x9 and 13x13 games

I made a cheap goban using glass half-convex stones from San Francisco's Chinatown ($4), a couple of jewel boxes from Michael's craft store ($6) and printouts from Ben Damm's website.

These will suffice for studying tactics but I probably will need a real 19x19 goban soon.

Gone serious

My 10-year old daughter and I dabbled with this game one afternoon at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. After getting back to the San Francisco Bay Area, I decided to seriously study the game in my free time.

I picked four books to supplement what I've been learning online via Sensei's Library.

• Learn To Play Go, Vol. 1
• Learn To Play Go. Vol. 2
• The Second Book of Go
• Graded Go Problems for Beginners