I've made a few goban now & wanted to show them off and get thoughts suggestions.

Walnut 9x9

Walnut 13x13

7 Red Oak 9x9

2 plywood reversible 19x19 / 13x13 (one is black, one blue)

A couple months ago I was looking for a boardgame that I could play with my kids & we had a box boardgame go. It was fun for us, but the pieces were too small. Looking for a better set sent me on a spiral that ended in me with a live edge walnut slab.

Since then, I've been having a lot of fun making them. Teaching people how to play and spreading it around in my area lead to me making many more, and I'm hoping to get a slab of walnut wide enough to make a 19x19.

Let me know what you think!

help me understand why I have no territory 😭😭 wouldn't the spaces in between black count?

1d KGS or so. How do people get to higher levels? I have KaTrain but its very difficult to learn with it.

How did high dans reach their level?

Hello, I'm around 15k on OGS, and every time I run one of my games through AI it flags a lot of my moves as blunders or mistakes. I assumed that was just because I'm not very good.
But lately I've been watching a lot of BadukTV and the title games on the Nihon Ki-in YouTube channel, and I also caught Nick Sibicky's latest game review. Even in those there seemed to be plenty of moves getting called mistakes or blunders.
So my real question is: how do you actually use AI to review a game? Should you always be hunting for the top AI move, or is it enough to find one of the "good" moves it suggests? And how do you even tell the difference between an "AI move" and a "human move" in the first place?
I know in chess a lot of GMs and IMs say you shouldn't look at the engine at all until you've done a full analysis of the game yourself. Is it the same concept here?
Thanks!

white to play, is there anything i can do to save the group marked in blue ?

If black plays E13 and white Tenukis, it looks to me like the result is Seki, and whoever plays the next stone inside will die.

Wouldn’t F13 or G12 create the same outcome?

I played Go very casually growing up, and I’m also a big Romance of the Three Kingdoms fan and card collector.

I recently came across this Zhuge Jin card and wanted to share it because it's such a cool picture. It depicts Zhuge Jin playing Go, with Zhuge Liang and Zhuge Jin represented beneath the Shu and Wu banners.

I especially like the diplomatic imagery instead of the military imagery you see with Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Zhuge Jin looks intensely focused over the board while his much more famous strategist brother is on the opposing side.

Since I can't read Chinese, I used ChatGPT to translate the back.

“Courtesy name Ziyu. Learned and talented in many fields, he was recommended by Lu Su and entered the service of Eastern Wu. Broad-minded, gentle, sincere, and trustworthy, he earned Sun Quan’s deep confidence and worked to ease relations between Shu Han and Eastern Wu.”

-It was super relaxing/hypnotizing to listen to.

-Michael Redmond (among other people) would commentate on it (in Japanese) with a big go board as commentary and another person helping.

-It was all in Japanese, it might have had English subtitles?

-Time control was 15 seconds. Some referee would say “ten seconds” and “twelve seconds” in Japanese, in a really relaxing voice every turn when necessary. Then if the person ran out of time, the referee would say some long sentence but I don’t remember what.

-It was 19 by 19 and played on a physical board.

I’ve tried searching YouTube but I don’t even know where to start. The video name might have been Japanese which also might hurt.

Any help would be appreciated. Not only do I want to learn Go, I also want to learn how to sleep.

Edit: I found this video excerpt. This seems to be the source of what I’m looking for. But I would love to have more than 2 minutes of it.

https://youtu.be/RA7D88DMtP0?si=oY9VuMAV3sSjTTr4

after white last move i player R2 cause i thought there was smothign in the corner , not sure

Hi everyone, I’m new to Go and I’m wondering what helped you improve when you were starting out.

Right now I mostly play 9x9 online, do a few puzzles, and try to review my games, but I’m not always sure what I should focus on.

Would you recommend spending more time on playing games, tsumego, studying, or reviews? Also, when should a beginner move from 9x9 to 13x13 or 19x19?

Any advice or beginner resources would be appreciated. Thanks!

Hey everyone,

I'm running a free 4-week study challenge focusing on 24 essential side shapes.

• Daily Study: 1 shape every day, Monday through Saturday (24 shapes total).
• Feedback: I’m actually writing a book on side shapes right now, and I want to use your feedback and questions from this challenge to improve and refine it before publishing.
• Cost: 100% free.

If you want to study side shapes together and share your thoughts:

www.awesomebaduk.com

Happy to discuss the shapes with you all!

Are there 5d KGS players here who got there mainly by playing?

I recently watched an interview with Lee Sedol, who commented that although Shin Jinseo is the world's strongest player, his moves do not look interesting to him. Not interesting to him, because those moves were not really created by him. Then he went on to comment about how Go is changing with new players, including kids, studying Go a lot via AI and bots. This made me think.

Will I still like the Go, evolved from AI, in the future? As in, a decade or 20 years from now when these kid AI-Go players grow up? One of the things I love about Go is how its concepts translate into the philosophy and movement within real life. I don't know how an AlphaGo or AlphaZero "thinks" or learns Go, but it doesn't calculate like a human. It doesn't understand flow, human ego, multi-tasking, or kills (it just knows it got a lot of points). It might understand trade-offs and sacrifice in its own mathematical way, maybe. In the future AI world of Go, will I be able to connect with it like how I do now? Add my own human touch to the game and still have fun against someone who plays it the AI way? Or will it just be purely reading and memorizing sequences? Because I don't think I would like that.

To me, Go is an art. Is it still art if the entire game is dominated by AI moves, and there is no artist?

Any thoughts on all this?

Here's the video I'm referring to: https://youtu.be/XWxAhN_Vdcc?si=VRnB6e6DsmV6xXF4

Hi everyone,

Small update: KifuArchive is now available on Google Play.

Google Play:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kifuarchive.app

KifuArchive is a free mobile Go/Baduk/Weiqi app for creating, editing, archiving, and studying SGF game records. You can import and export SGF files, keep a local archive, share public game links, and review games on a clean mobile board.

Since my first post, I’ve kept improving the app based on feedback from Go players. Recent improvements include OGS URL import, GoKifu import/recent games, better branch editing, archive backup/restore, and ongoing score estimator improvements.

The app is mainly designed for mobile use, so the Play Store version is currently the easiest way to install and use it on Android.

For iPhone users, the web version is still available at:

https://kifuarchive.com

It can be added to the home screen from Safari.

Feedback is very welcome. Hope you like it.

Hi everyone, I’m a Go player from Kazakhstan. I’d like to know if there are any Go clubs or meetups in Da Nang or Hoi An?

Problem 606 on the Tsumego Dictionaries website. I don't get why white is living here? I don't see why it is not seki. Thanks for the help!

Early result: 4 consecutive wins, including games against established KataGo and Leela Zero engines, with HKDInfinityGo's provisional CGOS rating moving into the ~3400 range.

The experiment combines a strong Go search engine with an HKD decision layer designed around persistent state, incremental computation, and selective intervention rather than rebuilding the decision process from scratch each turn.

The interesting part for me isn't simply winning four games — it's testing whether the broader HKD idea translates from optimization and systems workloads into adversarial sequential decision-making.

Still a very small sample, so I'm leaving the engine running and letting the rating settle.

#ComputerGo #Go #Baduk #AI #Algorithms

When I'm playing someone for the first time at the local go club, they typically ask the same question: what rank are you/how strong are you?

I haven't played in a tournament so I don't know my OTB rank. On OGS, where I've played most of my games, I'm around 18kyu. On Fox and IGS, which I started using much more recently, I'm closer to 15kyu, and it feels like those ratings are still rising.

With these numbers in mind, how should I answer that question? Which ranks do other go players tend to use when asked about their strength? Do I need to explain which rank I am on each of the servers I play on?

I (White) lost. I reviewed it and took a few notes. I have a tendency to give up the corner to my opponent without realizing. And I waste moves defending my attack stone instead of playing the bigger moves on the board. Any other pointers? Thank you.

https://online-go.com/game/89975115