Learn to Play Go

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… 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 …