r/baduk • u/BelatedGreeting 5 kyu • 1d ago
What was your first introduction to Go?
I’ll go first: I saw the game in the movie Pi (1998), directed by Darren Aronofsky. A couple of years later I found a Go board for sale in a game shop and tried to teach myself. It was a disaster. Then, a few years after that, I found Dragon Go Server and started learning in earnest. Best game ever.
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u/SilchasRuin 1d 1d ago
I think it was through Hikaru no Go, but I actually started playing only when someone on my floor freshman year was a player.
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u/takamori 1d ago
The guy running my towns go club taught some of us at our middle school. Don’t remember much from that but I ended up getting into the game 10 years later and he was stilling running the club (he just stepped back, glad he can rest now haha).
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u/GreybeardGo 1 dan 1d ago
My first introduction was in elementary school, where I saw Go in the book "Games of the World: How To Make Them, How To Play Them, How They Came To Be" edited by Frederic V. Grunfeld. A few years later I found the game "Penté" which is based on go-moku (five in a row), and that led me to learn Go. This was all way before the Internet or Hikaru.
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u/SwoleGymBro 20 kyu 1d ago
I was a chess player (very low rated, but I liked it anyway) and reading the chess subreddit. Someone there mentioned that Go is better, I didn't believe them so I started learning it and to my surprise I do like Go much, much more than chess. 🙂
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u/szopa 1d ago
For me it was also Pi by Aronoffsky! I was making a presentation about go at work on Thursday, and I looked up some clips to show. The acting is great, but positions on the goban are hilariously bad (black had this horrible clumpy group in the corner, so many randomly placed stones).
I showed my colleagues this clip: https://youtu.be/7-C1cpG6TLc?si=VOpBIVFTwy5-hcJJ
Btw yesterday there were people playing very intently on 9x9 boards I printed, so… mission accomplished! 🤩
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u/PatrickTraill 6 kyu 1d ago
Found it in an encyclopedia around 1965. Thought “surround” had to mean “separate from the edge”. Played a few games like that on graph paper with felt tip pens. Learned correct rules a few years later.
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u/SGTWhiteKY 20 kyu 1d ago
Books where it was featured that helped inspire me to play:
Wheel of Time (under the name “stones”)
Painting the Mist (under the names “Angels and Demons”)
The Wandering Inn
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u/Environmental_Law767 1d ago
1974: Friend of mine, Rod Jones, wanted to play chess with me. I hate chess because Billy Crawford's big brother, Eddie, used to beat up on us little kids mercilessly without trying to help us get any better at chess. Asshole. So Rod says to me, "You don't like chess, I see. Let's try go." I was immediately attracted to the equipment and we played often. But he never got a decent game out of me. I didn't get it. Not his fault, I just wasn't ready. Ten years later, I met Neal and he was a good teacher and I was ready. Hmm, I've been playing for about fifty years, on and off.
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u/Leeflet 18 kyu 1d ago
The movie Hero with Jet Li, Maggie Q, and Donny Yen. There’s one scene where Jet Li’s character and Donny Yen’s character are fighting. In the middle of the fight, they take a break to play this game with some stones. I Googled what that game was. Turns out it’s based on Go. Been playing Go ever since.
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u/ChapelEver 4 kyu 1d ago
A math teacher mentioned the game off-hand, and then I heard people in the game development space calling the rules "elegant." Then I learned the rules on some plain html website, thought it sounded cool but had no idea where or how to play with anyone. So it took me a while to start playing.
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u/paul-b-rimmer 1d ago
Mine too! I saw it first in Pi, but thought the game looked monumentally uninteresting. Same with Beautiful Mind. What's the point? It's like checkers but the pieces are on the intersections, and they're all the same. Chess looked better.
Then I watched the Alpha Go games. Initially, I watched them because of I was curious about the AI, but then I got hooked. Go is an incredible, beautiful game, that is so rich and deep, I'll never even get near truly enjoying its riches.
I've been playing on and off ever since. It's great fun!
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u/anadosami 4 kyu 1d ago
I stumbled upon it on Wikipedia at 13 looking at games similar to chess. The 'Computer Go' page was particularly interesting - I loved the idea of a game computers couldn't play well.
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u/raf401 5 kyu 1d ago
Pi and A Beautiful Mind. What attracted me to it was how aesthetically pleasing it looked. A few years later when I was bedridden with hepatitis I decided to use the time to learn, and found Sensei’s Library and SmartGo. I think I still like to play because it’s so beautiful, even more when playing with a nice board and set of stones.
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u/BleedingRaindrops 10 kyu 1d ago
Oddly enough a friend in college had it in his room and after I schooled him in chess he wanted to show me his new game (This was 2011 so not unheard of but still quite odd for an American to be aware of it).
I loved the way the stones felt in my hands. He had biconvex 12mm stones so they were basically Skittles. It made it very strange later when I found out about 21mm stones.
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u/leonprimrose 6k 1d ago
I found one of those itty bitty boards in a little toy shop in washington state when i visited. I knew about the game as some ancient asian game and decided I was curious about it. So i bought it and started learning. I didnt watch hikaru no go until later
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u/JesstForFun 6 kyu 22h ago
I was vaguely aware of it beforehand due to my interest in board game AI (I was more interested in Chess though), but it was AlphaGo that really brought my attention onto the game. Several years after that I read an article about KataGo and found it very interesting, so I downloaded KataGo and a GUI to try it out. Gradually, that got me into the game itself.
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u/BelatedGreeting 5 kyu 20h ago
I’m sure you saw the documentary about AlphaGo’s rise to beat Lee Sedal, which is excellent.
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u/JesstForFun 6 kyu 19h ago
I have, yes. :) For anyone who hasn't, it's here. It's well worth the watch!
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u/TofuPython 11 kyu 1d ago
I went to chess club with a friend in college. After a game of chess, he showed me go. I never played chess again.
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u/TransGothTalia 1d ago
Hikaru No Go. I watched it on Toonami Jetstream. I watched the first episode and immediately wanted to learn how to play. I didn't have a board and I was like 12 so I had no way to get one, but I tried desperately to find my old Othello board to use, to no avail. I ran to my grandparents' house next door to steal their oversized four-player chess board and giant bag of checkers and learned how to play on that. I very quickly outpaced the releases of the English dub and this became the first anime I watched subbed, and when Hikaru discovered Internet go and I learned that was an option I started playing for hours every day between episodes. It literally took over my life for a few years and my parents ended up getting me a go board a couple years after I watched that first episode.
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u/Spare_Violinist797 23h ago
The moment I saw Hikaru no Go on Toonami (it was being advertised at the time as a show that you could watch on Toonami)
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u/J4CK_IV 15 kyu 16h ago
I heard about its existance for decades. Odd mention once a five years or so, but never knew anything except the name. But I was thinking that one day I would like to find out more. And then , one day, one coworker (missing an opponent) suggested anime called Hikaru no go to me. It got me hooked and when I was nearing the end of it, he suggested to play few games together ...
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u/vanillaholler 16h ago
My friend and colleague Jesse in school taught me and some other friends. It took me almost a decade to get back into it and find others who were too but I did and am actually learning to play properly now lol.
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u/nAu9ht 30 kyu 13h ago edited 13h ago
as a child, spent hours on end watching my old caregiver play everytime i tagged along on my mothers worktrips to japan. and helping to stable the stones during the occasional earthquake. grown up now, and still prefer being on the sidelines because i can never fathom being deserving of such a beautiful art/game.
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u/Spacebelt 7h ago
Hikaru no go ran in monthly shonen jump when I was a kid. At the time I thought it was SO boring.
After getting semi into chess in my twenties I rediscovered go and have been hooked ever since. I even went back to read the manga now understanding go and it was quite good.
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u/Asdfguy87 5h ago
After the Lee Sedol vs. AlphaGo match I read in the news, that AI beat humans in a game far more complex than chess. I have been actively playing chess for almost 10 years at that point, so I was intrigued by that statement, looked at the rules and still wondered how such simple rules could make for a complex game. I then got myself a physical board to play the game with my roommate and my neighbors and got hooked.
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u/Berry19x19 1h ago
A couple of books in the early 90s: Jian from Erik Van Lustbader, and Kawabata's The master of Go. The latter convincing me to let the game go for over 15 years.
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u/Winlodak 5 kyu 1d ago
I was aware of the game vaguely, since I saw it appear in some Chinese dramas etc.
One day, I found and watched the first episode of Hikaru no Go, thinking "oh, this is that game."
Ended up getting hooked on the show, and before I knew it, I wanted to play it myself haha.