I've taught Go to over fifty people over the years - and i've seen this over and over again: some people have shaking hands putting down the first stone in their first game ever.
For some reason they assume they ought to be good from the beginning. Even in their first game they try to be original. They're afraid to imitate moves they saw someone else play. It feels like watching someone trying to learn a language by not imitating the sounds they hear when others speak it.
But those that i saw who became really good, were always on the other end of the spectrum. Those who jump right in and played /really/ bad without any anxiety or pressure (no thinking at all and mostly just stubborn imitation of moves they saw someone else play before) and fast (many many many games, often not even to the end), almost always sticked to the game long enough to learn to appreciate and enjoy it, and sometimes even managed to excel at it.
There's something magical about the fearlessness of just playing. Pure curiosity, maybe even quite a bit of ambition, but especially the absolute surrender to repeated and premeditated failure.
This is the most provocative comment I've read on my post. Reading it, I find myself thinking I will never be good because I have some sort of emotional disability that gives me shaking hands compared to some other people that are imbued with the magic gift of curiosity and fearlessness.
Logically, I consider the possibility that such things can be learned or cultivated, and that perhaps I can one day be fearless and curious. But emotionally, there is something pessimistic inside me that believes I will always be this way.
Since you teach Go -- you probably teach it well, but I thought I'd share my experiences as a Go student who gave up after a couple of years.
My problem, and Raganwald's, is that I can generally read the rules of any new game and, based on those rules, formulate a strategy. I might not expect to win, but I at least have enough understanding of the mechanism of the game that I can pick a direction and run with it. (I was going to say, "that I can play passably well", but that really isn't it at all -- it's the formulation of strategy that's important to me, and, I suspect, Raganwald.)
So what happens in Go? Well, you're told the rules, and then you're given a few hints that don't make any sense to you, like the 3-4 stone. Either way, it's impossible to form a strategy. You might as well stand above the board and let stones loose from your fingers to fall randomly upon it.
And my teachers, bless their hearts, took it upon themselves to win by extremely large margins repeatedly, which I would not have taken personally if only I had finished each game with the feeling that I had learned something.
In the end, I became an "eh" player, but found myself dreading Tuesday night Go club, found it occupying too much of my mind space, and found that it wasn't really giving me anything positive in return.
There were very very few long term new recruits in the local club.
I've experienced more tension playing go than any game other than poker.
I think initially go particularly punishes people who are very strong at thinking their way through combinatorial problems.
If you're good at strategy in general, and used to quickly and deliberately thinking through decision trees, I think it's only natural to build up a sense of confidence of being able to be good at nearly any game.
But go utterly defeats this, as the initial few moves of the game involve very vague intuition. Certainly experienced players have a library of standard opening formations and patterns they rely on, but more importantly, they've played the countless games necessary to intuitively apply that knowledge effectively. There's a saying that if you learn the standard patterns (joseki) you become 2 stones weaker. It's true. It takes many games to integrate that knowledge into actual play effectively. Trying to learn it before you're ready is counterproductive.
The other proverb is great advice: lose your first 100 games as fast as possible. I'm still on this path, and have gone from understanding little to playing even against 14k players in the local club.
Keep courage, the anxiety may not go away, but the enjoyment of the game will rise to meet it.
I wonder which type of Go player I would be. Sometimes I do something like this with development, where I spend too much time feeling ignorant and try to ramp up my knowledge by reading. Once I jump into the coding I still feel underprepared as things stick better when you are intimate with the context, and I end up feeling like I should have just jumped into coding first. I think most of us have an easier time learning by doing.
This advice is applicable to so much more than Go or programming. For any endeavor, you have to be willing to fail for a while before ever gaining any kind of competence. Writing, sports, picking up women.
When I was eight years old, my father taught me to play Go. My father is terrible at Go, probably the worst player I've ever played. So, I entered college thinking I was fairly good.
I got completely, embarrassingly, destroyed in my first game. And the next two.
After that, I read a book on it, probably the same one the author read (Learn to Play Go by Janice Kim) and didn't really follow at all. Still getting destroyed.
Then I did what the author didn't do: I played at least twenty games of Go a day. I played a Windows program called Igowin, I played a really bad Palm app while standing in lines or on the bus, I played GNU Go on my laptop.
At first I lost every time, then about half the time, then almost never, at which point I played a human again.
And got destroyed, because I had learned tricks to beat the computer, rather than actual good Go techniques.
I guess my point is that this taught me two things: when learning something, there is no substitute for doing it twenty times a day; and that no matter how much you think you have Go figured out, you probably don't.
I've been playing go on and off for over ten years now and _heartily_ recommend anyone remotely interested in learning to sign up for kgs (http://www.gokgs.com/) and download the java client. There is a fantastic community there, including a few beginner rooms. Often, people will stay after and review the game with you, which is basically a free lesson. People are consistently polite and respectful on kgs, which I can't say of other go networks (igs, for example). Additionally, it's really easy to get a quick match whenever you want with someone appropriately ranked, and it figures out your rank as you play people.
If you're going to play in person, try to play smaller boards, like 9x9, so you can get a sense of tactics and local patterns. Mark_h said it already in this thread, but I'll repeat: lose your first fifty (or more) games as quickly as possible. When you're first getting started, the goal is just to get a handle on how play progresses, not to win. Getting comfortable losing makes it easier to learn.
Please feel free to find me on kgs, username jrothstein. I'd love to help share my love of the game with other hackers. Also feel free to contact me (info in profile) with any questions about the game or for a review (I'll try my best).
If anybody in San Francisco wants to play in person, I'm usually up for a game after work. I've only been playing seriously for a few months (current rating 25.5k), but I'll gladly play anybody, including teaching what I can to beginners. Send me an email if you're interested in playing.
This post makes me want to start a blog, just to answer some of these questions.
Go is really hard to teach. I try to avoid it whenever possible. This isn't trying to be a wiseass; i find this actually has some great effects. I've found teaching go has to be a student-driven process to be successful; the onus is on the student to generate questions, and, to go another step, the student must seek & have the experiences that will generate the questions. This almost always means playing go for yourself.
This implies that the student has already conquered a lot of (very real) internal fears; the fear of performing incompetently, the fear of being thought dumb. The fear of failure, basically. An interesting thing to run across on a blog for entrepreneurs.
The saddest part about that article was that so many of those sentences are "I" sentences; you write "I feel" this, "i think" that, "I am [x], i won't be [y], i will never be [z]". Even the comments about your friend are defined in terms of yourself. The problem is that probably no one else is as concerned about your performance as you are.
This is something that could be incredibly liberating from the right perspective. Who is judging you here? Not your friend, certainly! It's not a reflection on your character unless you make it one -- and you don't have to make it one.
Your conclusions at the end are so close!
"The courage to play incompetently is a cure for fear of incompetence"
this is true, but it's almost a tautology. Perhaps a more useful formulation is this:
"The courage to play incompetently is a cure for incompetence." Maybe it is the only cure.
Relax, enjoy, & Dare To Suck -- your performance at something you've never done is not and will not be used as a measurement of your worth as a person. That gift of "curiousity & fearlessness" is not a personality trait; people get nervous when they feel like they're being judged. You're not -- at least, not by anyone but yourself.
P.S. I will happily answer any go questions. Send me a link to your game & questions, (perhaps on eidogo.com), and i will try to answer to the best of my ability (4d kgs).
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I just want to point out that ""The courage to play incompetently is a cure for fear of incompetence" is true, and obviously a tautology. However, it is taken out of context. The full line reads:
Competence is not a cure for the fear of incompetence. The courage to play incompetently is a cure for fear of incompetence. Put in contrast, I think it has more value than standing alone.
I see this often in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, where beginners not only have no idea what they're doing, but they don't even realize how little they know. And being incompetent in BJJ means you're going to spend many minutes with someone literally on top of you. Some people are so overwhelmed by this experience that they don't come back.
But, my experience has been the people who don't come back are those that thought they would do well - the ones that figured "I'm a tough guy, I can hang." When they do just as one would expect a beginner to do, their ego is hurt so much they just don't want to go through it again. I think that for some, being a "tough guy" is part of their identity, and being confronted with the reality is so jarring they'd rather not even learn.
The ones who stick around are the ones who aren't upset about losing.
I don't know much about the Go game, but this is such a beautifully written article about the general anxiety one encounters while learning new things. I have this exact feeling in my effort to learn programming (despite working as a programmer for 10 years now). Every time I encounter a new concept (possibly very basic), I criticize myself for working as a programmer without knowing such things.
I've learned many abstract strategy games. I play some fairly well, others not so much so.
When I approach a new game, I assume it will take many hundreds (or thousands!) of plays to become truly good at it. I assume that I will play poorly for my first N games -- so, it's best to get them out of the way as quickly as possible. I try to think in terms of, "did I learn something from that loss?" -- if the answer is yes, it was still a worthwhile experience.
I think this is a good lesson for learning anything new. I think my first N programs were extremely poorly written. There was so much that I didn't know when I was starting out with programming! Now, 10+ years later I feel like I have a pretty good handle on things, but there are still areas of programming that I would like to know better.
I expect I'd see the same pattern learning anything new. If I were interested in drawing I'd expect the first hundred or more pictures to be lousy. If I wanted to become a writer, I'd expect the first hundred stories to be boring or full of misspellings and poor grammar.
For me, the question is: Does this knowledge make it easier or more difficult to start a new pursuit?
With go there are three very different stages of learning (has something to do with the fact that there are different sized boards). First you learn the rules - how to place the pieces, when is a group alive etc. Then you learn tactics: how are pieces 2-3 spaces apart linked, common patterns, counting etc. Finally you can make use of the 19x19 board and learn strategy - like how it's better to control corners rather then edges and edges rather then the center.
At each step you will get totaled by people who are ahead of you because each step gives you a completely new way of seeing the game. And you can't cheat and "learn ahead": strategy without tactics is useless.
Also, if you hate losing, for the love of god never play online. Sometimes it looks like half the population of Korea is online playing the other half, and when they classify themselves as "beginners" it usually means they can beat you while watching TV.
Rather than merely resolving to overcome the fear, I'd make myself imagine what's supposed to be so bad about the thing I'm afraid of (not being top-.001% gifted? being destroyed by an expert? that both occur in view of others?), and reassure myself that the feared outcome is not actually so terrible.
However, making a public resolution is also a good approach.
I think the quote should be "lose your first 50 games as quickly and thoughtfully as possible."
Ideally, you are losing to progressively better opponents. This gives you the opportunity to ask for help and learn better technique as you are losing. Online Go is great because you can record your games and get others to critique them.
I love Go. I love that there are implied threats, feints, and sacrifices. I love that seemingly random moves can be so critical in later stages. Go is a game of experience. You really have to enjoy the process of unraveling the mystery of the game and not worry so much about winning.
I thought it was excellent. I have this kind of anxiety problem all the time, especially when writing new code, because the code I write might be wrong, so I end up just sitting there, not solving the problem, not thinking about the problem, but just staring.
When I was an undergraduate living in a dorm, I and several friends all learned Go together. Nobody knew what they were doing, and so no one was particularly nervous. Even keeping score was an exercise in passing around examples from the instruction book.
Not the most efficient way to learn, but among the least stressful -- if you're patient enough with one another.
[+] [-] enki|16 years ago|reply
For some reason they assume they ought to be good from the beginning. Even in their first game they try to be original. They're afraid to imitate moves they saw someone else play. It feels like watching someone trying to learn a language by not imitating the sounds they hear when others speak it.
But those that i saw who became really good, were always on the other end of the spectrum. Those who jump right in and played /really/ bad without any anxiety or pressure (no thinking at all and mostly just stubborn imitation of moves they saw someone else play before) and fast (many many many games, often not even to the end), almost always sticked to the game long enough to learn to appreciate and enjoy it, and sometimes even managed to excel at it.
There's something magical about the fearlessness of just playing. Pure curiosity, maybe even quite a bit of ambition, but especially the absolute surrender to repeated and premeditated failure.
[+] [-] raganwald|16 years ago|reply
Logically, I consider the possibility that such things can be learned or cultivated, and that perhaps I can one day be fearless and curious. But emotionally, there is something pessimistic inside me that believes I will always be this way.
It's quite a disturbing thing to contemplate.
[+] [-] thaumaturgy|16 years ago|reply
My problem, and Raganwald's, is that I can generally read the rules of any new game and, based on those rules, formulate a strategy. I might not expect to win, but I at least have enough understanding of the mechanism of the game that I can pick a direction and run with it. (I was going to say, "that I can play passably well", but that really isn't it at all -- it's the formulation of strategy that's important to me, and, I suspect, Raganwald.)
So what happens in Go? Well, you're told the rules, and then you're given a few hints that don't make any sense to you, like the 3-4 stone. Either way, it's impossible to form a strategy. You might as well stand above the board and let stones loose from your fingers to fall randomly upon it.
And my teachers, bless their hearts, took it upon themselves to win by extremely large margins repeatedly, which I would not have taken personally if only I had finished each game with the feeling that I had learned something.
In the end, I became an "eh" player, but found myself dreading Tuesday night Go club, found it occupying too much of my mind space, and found that it wasn't really giving me anything positive in return.
There were very very few long term new recruits in the local club.
[+] [-] jasonwatkinspdx|16 years ago|reply
I think initially go particularly punishes people who are very strong at thinking their way through combinatorial problems.
If you're good at strategy in general, and used to quickly and deliberately thinking through decision trees, I think it's only natural to build up a sense of confidence of being able to be good at nearly any game.
But go utterly defeats this, as the initial few moves of the game involve very vague intuition. Certainly experienced players have a library of standard opening formations and patterns they rely on, but more importantly, they've played the countless games necessary to intuitively apply that knowledge effectively. There's a saying that if you learn the standard patterns (joseki) you become 2 stones weaker. It's true. It takes many games to integrate that knowledge into actual play effectively. Trying to learn it before you're ready is counterproductive.
The other proverb is great advice: lose your first 100 games as fast as possible. I'm still on this path, and have gone from understanding little to playing even against 14k players in the local club.
Keep courage, the anxiety may not go away, but the enjoyment of the game will rise to meet it.
[+] [-] sjs|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saturdayplace|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randrews|16 years ago|reply
I got completely, embarrassingly, destroyed in my first game. And the next two.
After that, I read a book on it, probably the same one the author read (Learn to Play Go by Janice Kim) and didn't really follow at all. Still getting destroyed.
Then I did what the author didn't do: I played at least twenty games of Go a day. I played a Windows program called Igowin, I played a really bad Palm app while standing in lines or on the bus, I played GNU Go on my laptop.
At first I lost every time, then about half the time, then almost never, at which point I played a human again.
And got destroyed, because I had learned tricks to beat the computer, rather than actual good Go techniques.
I guess my point is that this taught me two things: when learning something, there is no substitute for doing it twenty times a day; and that no matter how much you think you have Go figured out, you probably don't.
[+] [-] jbr|16 years ago|reply
If you're going to play in person, try to play smaller boards, like 9x9, so you can get a sense of tactics and local patterns. Mark_h said it already in this thread, but I'll repeat: lose your first fifty (or more) games as quickly as possible. When you're first getting started, the goal is just to get a handle on how play progresses, not to win. Getting comfortable losing makes it easier to learn.
Web resources I can recommend: http://playgo.to/iwtg/en/ and http://senseis.xmp.net/
Please feel free to find me on kgs, username jrothstein. I'd love to help share my love of the game with other hackers. Also feel free to contact me (info in profile) with any questions about the game or for a review (I'll try my best).
[+] [-] andrewljohnson|16 years ago|reply
People are polite on KGS because politeness and topicality are enforced by the moderators.
[+] [-] kd5bjo|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seigenblues|16 years ago|reply
Go is really hard to teach. I try to avoid it whenever possible. This isn't trying to be a wiseass; i find this actually has some great effects. I've found teaching go has to be a student-driven process to be successful; the onus is on the student to generate questions, and, to go another step, the student must seek & have the experiences that will generate the questions. This almost always means playing go for yourself.
This implies that the student has already conquered a lot of (very real) internal fears; the fear of performing incompetently, the fear of being thought dumb. The fear of failure, basically. An interesting thing to run across on a blog for entrepreneurs.
The saddest part about that article was that so many of those sentences are "I" sentences; you write "I feel" this, "i think" that, "I am [x], i won't be [y], i will never be [z]". Even the comments about your friend are defined in terms of yourself. The problem is that probably no one else is as concerned about your performance as you are.
This is something that could be incredibly liberating from the right perspective. Who is judging you here? Not your friend, certainly! It's not a reflection on your character unless you make it one -- and you don't have to make it one.
Your conclusions at the end are so close! "The courage to play incompetently is a cure for fear of incompetence" this is true, but it's almost a tautology. Perhaps a more useful formulation is this: "The courage to play incompetently is a cure for incompetence." Maybe it is the only cure.
Relax, enjoy, & Dare To Suck -- your performance at something you've never done is not and will not be used as a measurement of your worth as a person. That gift of "curiousity & fearlessness" is not a personality trait; people get nervous when they feel like they're being judged. You're not -- at least, not by anyone but yourself.
See also: http://senseis.xmp.net/?FearOfLosing and the go proverb "lose your first 100 games as quickly as you can"
relax & good luck
-seigenblues
P.S. I will happily answer any go questions. Send me a link to your game & questions, (perhaps on eidogo.com), and i will try to answer to the best of my ability (4d kgs).
[+] [-] raganwald|16 years ago|reply
Competence is not a cure for the fear of incompetence. The courage to play incompetently is a cure for fear of incompetence. Put in contrast, I think it has more value than standing alone.
[+] [-] scott_s|16 years ago|reply
But, my experience has been the people who don't come back are those that thought they would do well - the ones that figured "I'm a tough guy, I can hang." When they do just as one would expect a beginner to do, their ego is hurt so much they just don't want to go through it again. I think that for some, being a "tough guy" is part of their identity, and being confronted with the reality is so jarring they'd rather not even learn.
The ones who stick around are the ones who aren't upset about losing.
[+] [-] mark_h|16 years ago|reply
Having said that, I struggled to do this (even against a computer I hated to lose, which impeded my progress for ages).
[+] [-] ananthrk|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lhorie|16 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Go
[+] [-] Locke|16 years ago|reply
When I approach a new game, I assume it will take many hundreds (or thousands!) of plays to become truly good at it. I assume that I will play poorly for my first N games -- so, it's best to get them out of the way as quickly as possible. I try to think in terms of, "did I learn something from that loss?" -- if the answer is yes, it was still a worthwhile experience.
I think this is a good lesson for learning anything new. I think my first N programs were extremely poorly written. There was so much that I didn't know when I was starting out with programming! Now, 10+ years later I feel like I have a pretty good handle on things, but there are still areas of programming that I would like to know better.
I expect I'd see the same pattern learning anything new. If I were interested in drawing I'd expect the first hundred or more pictures to be lousy. If I wanted to become a writer, I'd expect the first hundred stories to be boring or full of misspellings and poor grammar.
For me, the question is: Does this knowledge make it easier or more difficult to start a new pursuit?
[+] [-] maxklein|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radu_floricica|16 years ago|reply
At each step you will get totaled by people who are ahead of you because each step gives you a completely new way of seeing the game. And you can't cheat and "learn ahead": strategy without tactics is useless.
Also, if you hate losing, for the love of god never play online. Sometimes it looks like half the population of Korea is online playing the other half, and when they classify themselves as "beginners" it usually means they can beat you while watching TV.
[+] [-] jongraehl|16 years ago|reply
However, making a public resolution is also a good approach.
[+] [-] jongraehl|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdh|16 years ago|reply
Ideally, you are losing to progressively better opponents. This gives you the opportunity to ask for help and learn better technique as you are losing. Online Go is great because you can record your games and get others to critique them.
I love Go. I love that there are implied threats, feints, and sacrifices. I love that seemingly random moves can be so critical in later stages. Go is a game of experience. You really have to enjoy the process of unraveling the mystery of the game and not worry so much about winning.
[+] [-] unknown|16 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|16 years ago|reply
Once, in the late 70s, I got to play the womens world champion when she was in San Diego - awesome experience.
Go is a beautiful game, but not for everyone.
[+] [-] unknown|16 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] shrughes|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crux|16 years ago|reply
A cursory look at the internet, at geek temperament, or at geeks on the internet will quickly put that assumption to bed.
[+] [-] BearOfNH|16 years ago|reply
Not the most efficient way to learn, but among the least stressful -- if you're patient enough with one another.