11/18/08
Nakatani Apartment, Nagoya

Not all that much interesting happened today. I showed my host family Go with the little set I bought in Nara. The kids seemed more interested in losing the pieces and playing othello with it, but my host mom figured out enough to play a whole game with me. She liked it ok, but she seemed way more interested in it after she won.

1 comments:

Jeff said...

Being interested in a new game is often correlated with initial wins... and Go seems particularly susceptible to this psychological effect. Further, convincing new users to use handicap stones properly is tough. That is, a beginner must (when appropriate) admit that their opponent is stronger and USE handicap stones to level the playing field rather than insisting on playing even and losing until interest in the game disappears.

(The sequence in HnG where Akira forces jigo in four games simultaneously illustrates how a strong player can take up the rest of the slack and keep the win-loss record near 50-50. This is something I have been woefully poor at in the past, and I still have plenty of room for improvement.)