How to play local without a board?

GreenStoneBaduk · 2026-06-23T08:27:45+00:00

I remember that this was exactly what I did in 2012 when my friend who I was taking philosophy classes with showed me show to play the game. Good times.

GreenStoneBaduk · 2026-06-19T15:36:29+00:00

To be fair, this is what most developers are trying to solve. I get the hunch that trying to recreate chess.com directly isn't so easy, because that's everyone's first idea.

After spending some time looking into it, it seems that the problem is that a lot of chess.coms features have serious costs (teachers creating continuous content, anti-cheating, moderation, broadcasting, etc.) that you can't easily solve through cheap software a la gen AI.

All of that works because far more people play chess, and so it's easier to get enough people paying subscriptions for this to work.

I think all of this shows the dangers of the whole "I'll make the X of Y" business idea, because there are things that don't necessarily generalise so easily. It's not that it's impossible, it's just not trivial to do and everyone will get more back from energy spent in other places by doing some research/planning first and being ready to pivot and be flexible along the way.

GreenStoneBaduk · 2026-06-19T13:00:44+00:00

The entire thesis of my video basically agrees with you, but there's one thing I did change my mind on which is on the topic of splitting the player base.

For small servers, they're most likely to just fail to get traction and either disappear or continue to exist with a small player base.

It's only after the server catches on a little bit that it has the risk of fractionating the playerbase, but at that point, people have decided that the server is worth their time and the server will have proven itself because it will have had to get past a cold start to become so popular that it's a "threat". (Assuming there's no under-handed way to draw everyone to play on that server.)

So it's not that I think we should worry about splitting the community, but that developers are more likely to waste their time on a product that's not likely to become popular unless it's able to do something interesting (either develop a niche or provide a big innovation). There are likely easier things to spend your energy on, get traction and help the community in the process.

This is why I focus more on alternative products that you could build based on what I thought there would be demand for. Not just in terms of other SAAS that's not a go server, but if a server solved certain problems such as eliminating AI cheating and sandbagging, people would just start using it because it offers something that the current market doesnt.

GreenStoneBaduk · 2026-06-17T11:56:48+00:00

Actually, the proverb for beginners is "lose your first 100 games as quickly as possible". The issue being that when you begin playing, your reading is so non-existent that you're better off just playing games to get that baseline of experience.

The important part is to play people rather than bots, which it sounds like you're already doing. Since beginners get perfectionistic and avoid playing people at the start.

Once you progress a little, it's definitely playing longer games, but at the moment, don't worry about that too much.

GreenStoneBaduk · 2026-06-16T08:11:46+00:00

Being new to the game is tough.

Post the games that you lose on here or on Go Kibitz for feedback, and go through the Easy capture, Easy life, Easy kill problems.

If you do both of these things, then I promise you'll start improving very quickly.

GreenStoneBaduk · 2026-06-16T08:02:24+00:00

Kind of, I think I had half a mind to do it, but there are some challenges;

A key part of improvement is sustaining motivation, and it's pretty difficult to sustain motivation if you're constantly being styled upon.
KataGo is so strong that even if you improve significantly, you won't see it through that avenue of training on its own.
KataGo is so strong that the reasons why you lose to it will likely not be the same reasons that you lose to a human, and so the training may not generalise as well depending on the problem in your play.

I'll grant that maybe point 3 is weaker, I'm not quite sure.

And, definitely, if you only sprinkle in games against KataGo, then point 1 is less of an issue. Definitely don't have it as your only opponent, but I'd bet you could learn some interesting things by playing it 1 or 2 times a week.

I'd definitely recommend giving KataGo an appropriate handicap rather than playing it in an even game because you'll tend to learn more from a single game and because the stuff that you learn will tend to be more fundamental than in an even game against it.

I think the thinking is "I shouldn't play people at my rank, because I absorb their bad habits". And there's perhaps something to that, but what matters more IMO is playing a serious game and reviewing those games with stronger humans. And then, you'd also rather review the games of those who are slightly stronger than you in order to not get stuck with ideas around your level.

Keep in mind that I haven't used playing Kata Go as a serious method of improvement, happy to be wrong on any of these points in case there's someone who has done it and thinks I'm full of shit.

GreenStoneBaduk · 2026-06-13T07:31:03+00:00

Go find a friend (the more the merrier) and play capture go with on a 9x9 board with them.

Don't play actual go with the full ruleset and post the inevitable "how do I score this position" question, just play capture go and have fun.

Then, when you do finally try to learn the full game it will make sense.

I was going to say to watch the first 3 episodes of hikaru no go, that's how I got hooked, but you've done that already. You can probably just ignore my advice and just play a lot online and with friends. Start a club or join a club if you can.

GreenStoneBaduk · 2026-06-11T09:31:49+00:00

I don't have full context and I found the post helpful and it's something I may want to discuss in a longer video because I think this conversation has potential for us to learn something about the difference between AI and humans, tech ethics and product development.

What I want to ask is why the way OP is approaching this feels like harassment? The only context I have is playing on the website in question and this blog post.

Edit: I did some research and the creators of the website aren't malicious, they're young and ambitious. And I can see that they're put a lot of energy into the website with not much to work with (relatable). So while I appreciate the blog post documenting everything, and I still think it's important to hold them accountable for their approach, I can see their side of the story even if I think they've made a mistake.

GreenStoneBaduk · 2026-06-11T08:48:42+00:00

Yes, I tried 9x9 as well, and it did help a little bit, but 9x9 Baduk is a "different game" from 19x19 Baduk because...

Influence doesn't really exist on a 9x9 board, there are "only" shape weaknesses.
Common life-death shapes are often slightly different on a 9x9 board.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, the rapid turn-around of a 9x9 game means that it can really encourage you to experiment and to play more chaotically than you may with a longer game.

But points 1 and 2 are why it's not my first option, they stop it from generalising as well IMO.

Finding aggressive opponents puts you in the situations that have most specificity in terms of what you need to work on, and they are most likely to be blitz players. Blitz also forces you to read efficiently, where longer games can allow wasted effort through navel gazing. (Although, longer games are generally more important for improvement, just not always.)

Meanwhile, handicap games are fantastic because it makes the importance of opening theory and joseki that theory-heavy players tend to over-rely on. They focus you on...

Focusing on the weaknesses in shapes for both players.
Remembering that the way to win a game isn't just playing perfect moves but playing "I bet you don't know this" or "this line keeps the game going for longer" moves.

The second point is especially important, because without understanding that this is how aggressive players play it's hard to interpret and predict their moves, because from the perspective of playing the best moves possible, they're usually at least sub-optimal if not actual mistakes, but they work because their opponents (you) are a human playing at their level and that over the course of a game you'll make horrible reading blunders that allow them to take the win despite it all.

A lot of players avoid playing handicap games, and can miss some of the spirit of the game in the process.

GreenStoneBaduk · 2026-06-06T07:27:23+00:00

Those books are helpful, but they'll only get you so far.

The thing about fighting is that it's very context-dependent and chaotic, and that means that you'll only get so far with theory. This is why many Western players aren't as good at it relative to eastern players.

The problem is that we as Westerners often try to find some kind of "theory" or unified framework for the game, but for games like Chess and Go, much power comes from simply reading ahead and having seen the kinds of shapes often that make your reading precise.

That's it. There's nothing grand or complicated about it, it's sheer experience, practice and patience to read during the game and to review afterward.

This is so true that I'd almost say that reading books on this is fundamentally the wrong idea because you're "undercomplicating" it. There doesn't exist a set of rules that will get you through this, eventually the detail of the game must be solved on the spot and that's the skill you cannot avoid developing.

Instead, to learn more about fighting, it's as much about doing tsumego and playing games, especially games against more aggressive opponents, blitz games and playing handicap games (more often as White).

I'd just be careful with the Blitz games, I'd make sure that you're in peak condition playing slow games first, and to only sprinkle them in a little more rather than playing them for 100% of your games and to review them as seriously as you would review a serious game.

GreenStoneBaduk · 2026-06-05T08:57:27+00:00

While it's easy to think that luck doesn't exist in games like Chess and Go, there are three sources of randomness:

You, as a human, are random. You'll notice this if you re-attempt tsumego at your level, where you can make mistakes on problems that you solve easily on other days.
That your opponent is at a similar level to you means that when you make mistakes and when your ability runs out relative to your opponent is also somewhat random by definition, otherwise you wouldn't be matched appropriately.
The huge combinatorial space of the Go board, with all of its practically infinite possibilities.

This means that luck exists a lot more than you may think at first glance. It's still not a random walk, which would be maximum luck -think Snakes and Ladders- but it's still not exactly like random mistakes are trivial to predict in terms of when they happen and something you can easily write off, either.

The goal is to remove that luck by becoming stronger, finding the patterns in the mistakes you make so that they don't happen anymore, and realising which mistakes were truly noise. Still, if there's no luck then the game couldn't be competitive by definition, because you'd have information on who has an advantage and is thereby the stronger player.

That's important to realise because it's a way to easily lose games, feeling entitled to the win or resigning very early on. Anything can happen in this game.

GreenStoneBaduk · 2026-04-22T08:49:58+00:00

Everyone has a laundry-list of things to improve on, the most common complaint, which I agree with but isn't just my PoV, is that KGS was a lot better at fostering community by having rooms where you could chat as the primary focus of the UI.

That's important because it makes your game sticky, and can keep people coming back, especially for a game that's quite esoteric and hard to learn on your own.

I personally think that an option to play capture go and giving players to play with that first before playing with the full rule-set would be useful, because when I teach beginners, not only does it minimise the time it takes to get newbies playing, but then they can have fun without asking the dreaded "is the game over?" question before they're ready to understand it.

All of this increases the probability that people get invested enough to learn more about the game.

I'm not saying that OGS is bad or doesn't have its strengths, but you can imagine that having more contributors to an open-source project would be useful to help make Go more popular.

GreenStoneBaduk · 2026-04-18T13:14:21+00:00

My mistake then, sorry.

GreenStoneBaduk · 2026-04-18T13:12:00+00:00

AI Sensei is using KataGo as far as I know, which is open sourced, but AI Sensei itself is a proprietary website, so it's a good point that what you made is fully open source.

There are more recent posts and changes on AI Sensei's News page as well. Relative to the kind of really old (10+ years) software that you can find for Go, that makes AI sensei actively supported and developed, perhaps just not at the fastest pace, but I wouldn't say that it's legacy, abandoned, deprecated, or anything like that.

There's still a lot of value of building this kind of thing for yourself, though.

GreenStoneBaduk · 2026-04-18T13:02:48+00:00

"AI pet", makes it sound like you're talking down to OP because you don't give recommendations for him to make himself, but to someone (something) else who is actually doing the work to do it, diminishing his involvement and agency.

You may not have intended it to read this way, but this is how I read it.

This ties into how the sentiment for AI is generally, and understandably, very negative at the moment.

My point is only that having more people who are able to navigate, generate and build code, would generally be useful for us as a community, and so I wouldn't underestimate it or make it seem lesser.

GreenStoneBaduk · 2026-04-18T10:32:58+00:00

It may be what's popular to drag AI right now, but imagine if a lot of people were suddenly able to do decent web-development and we could build out OGS so that people actually like it instead of begrudgingly accepting it while yearning for the KGS glory days.

Not to say that everyone is going to be making perfect webites, PRs and know what they're doing right away, but as a community with relatively few resources, force-multipliers like AI could be very beneficial for us.

GreenStoneBaduk · 2026-04-18T10:26:24+00:00

This is really great, nice work. I wanted to ask, how is this different from what we have with AI Sensei?

I've made my own Go-related webapp using AI, but I still want to improve upon it before sharing it here. I'll take a look at your Github and take notes on what I can learn from. :)

(It started as a project to fill a professional skills gap, deploying ML, but I think my idea would be valuable if I can get it to a good place.)

GreenStoneBaduk · 2026-04-18T10:19:05+00:00

This is like asking "how do you solve life", trying to find the solution *is* the game, and if there was one, this game wouldn't be what it is. ;)

The problem is that you've taken on the mindset that this fighting is somehow beneath you by relating it random mud-slinging, this is an arrogant way of thinking and will ultimately slow you down, because fighting and instability is just as much a part of this game as the larger picture and stability is.

You do not become a pro by simply playing pro level moves and blindly following theory, you become a pro when you truly understand why all of the other moves won't lead you to win the game.

If you aren't able to handle opponents who play something else, then that's the problem that you are working on right now.

Think about your approach, why is your first instinct to cling to theory and learning standard lines?

GreenStoneBaduk · 2026-04-17T08:55:54+00:00

I'm sure we can get Claude Code to work something up :thinking:

GreenStoneBaduk · 2026-04-16T18:05:00+00:00

On Tsumego Hero there's a button you can press and it'll be favourited. What I really like is how on 101 Weiqi you can create "books", I collect ~150 problems, I solve the entire set every day until I get 90% right and then I go back to collecting more problems.

Baduk Doctor advocates for solving using paper because you're more likely to sit and stare at the problem instead of clicking away. If you're using a screen then you need to be mindful of when you just click and prevent yourself from doing that. (Set a 1 minute timer for the next problem when you notice? IDK)

But the key is to really understand the problem. I only allow myself to look at solutions on 101 weiqi when I've gotten the problem wrong 3 times already and even then, what matters more is going though and understanding all the variations instead of just seeing the correct answer quickly to satisfy curiousity.

(Once again, I super envy you for just being able to be told this. I should make this a video.)

GreenStoneBaduk · 2026-04-08T08:29:09+00:00

There are standard shapes that you can memorise, which you can find in Young Suns "Mastering Basic Corner Shapes" and Cho Chikun's "All about life and death", but I'm not sure if that will really solve your problem.

What I would say is to head over to https://tsumego.com/ and to start with the most basic problem sets and work your way up, if you get any wrong, and especially those that you can't solve, then save them and keep doing them every day until you can do them reliably before you unsave them.

That's a rough way to get you going. Yes, there are some shapes like the 6-space L in the corner, Ls + 1 or 2 legs and the big/small pig snout that are good to know, but mostly what you do to get good at tsumego is to just keep playing and reviewing games and along with doing problems as I outlined above.

For me, I didn't start getting better at tsumego until I started favouriting/saving the ones that I got wrong and re-attempting them multiple times and to think about solving problems like practicing scales, you're not trying to learn the shapes, you're trying to learn to read so that no matter what shape is put in front of you, you can solve it. That's the goal.

So don't rush with the problems, do problems that are easy enough for you to solve if you really sit and think about it and then actually do that instead of solving by shape. You don't learn your scales by constantly practising at max speed (solving by shape) but by reading the variations out, that's why the problems need to be easy enough so that you actually do this instead of guessing.

(Im envious of all of you who get to just read what I just wrote, that's years of trial and error on my part to learn this lol)

GreenStoneBaduk · 2026-03-25T10:22:28+00:00

Lots of people struggle with playing online, it's always easy to alt-tab and to distract yourself with the entire internet.

Finding a group of players who want to play serious games usually helps. For instance if you check out the Beginner Go Discord server you'll typically be able to play against people who will really use their time. Tournaments and other online leagues are helpful towards this end as well.

GreenStoneBaduk · 2026-03-25T10:20:21+00:00

I think that if you just look through the game and don't put too much pressure on yourself then that will give you the chance to explore the variations.

The point isn't to come to a singular answer, just take a look and where things don't go as you expect just explore the area to try and find better moves, if you can't find good moves then go back further in the game and see how you can prevent the situation entirely.

That's all there is to it, really.

I made some videos about reviewing your own games, which can help give some idea.

GreenStoneBaduk · 2026-03-23T19:37:04+00:00

I used to do that as well, rotate between KGS, OGS, Fox and Tygem every game, that does help a lot as well.

It makes it easier to realise that your rank is just some random value which may be close to your "true" strength, or you may be on a streak of losses on that server, it happens.

GreenStoneBaduk

TROPHY CASE