Welcome. We are twelve people who play go, the old board game of black and white stones, on Wednesday evenings at the big table in the back of a coffeehouse near campus. We are students and retirees, a nurse, a carpenter, two programmers, and me. We range from people who learned last month to people who have played for twenty years. New players are always welcome, and you don't need to bring anything. The boards and stones live on the shelf above the table, and the coffeehouse has been kind enough to let them stay there.

My name is Blair Biel. I teach physics at a high school here in Eugene. I learned go in 1976, when I was a young soldier in Korea, from a Korean corporal attached to my unit who played every evening on a board with a burn mark in one corner and who had more patience with me than I deserved. In Korea the game is called baduk. I've played it ever since, badly at first and then less badly, and I started this club in 1991 with two friends and a borrowed board.

If you've never played: come at seven on any Wednesday. Someone will sit down with you on a small 9x9 board and teach you in about twenty minutes. By nine o'clock you'll have played three or four games. By the end of the month you'll be dreaming about it. Everything below is on this page so you can read it ahead of time if you like, but you don't have to. The board teaches better than I do.

Go has very few rules. That's what makes it so deep.

● The board and the stones. The full board is a grid of 19 by 19 lines. Beginners start on smaller boards, 9 by 9 or 13 by 13. Two players, Black and White, take turns placing one stone on any empty intersection, where the lines cross. Black goes first. Once a stone is placed, it never moves. It stays until the end of the game, unless it's captured.

○ Liberties. The empty points directly next to a stone, along the lines, are its liberties. Diagonals don't count. Below, the white stone in the open has four liberties, marked a. The black stone on the edge (the bottom row of the picture is the edge of the board) has only three, marked b. Stones of the same color that touch along the lines are connected, and they share their liberties as one group.

● Capture. When a stone or a group has no liberties left, it is captured: it's taken off the board, and the player who captured it keeps it as a prisoner. Below, the white stone has one liberty left. That's called atari. If Black plays at 1, the white stone is captured and taken off.

○ No suicide. You may not play a stone where it (or the group it joins) would have no liberties, unless that move captures something. If it captures, the captured stones come off first, and then your stone has liberties.

● Ko. Sometimes a capture could be answered by an immediate recapture, back and forth forever. Below, Black plays 1 and captures the white stone. Now White could capture right back by playing at a, and then Black could capture again, and so on. The ko rule says: you may not make a move that returns the board to the position it was in just before your opponent's last move. So White must play somewhere else first. If Black doesn't fill in the ko, White may take it back next turn. Ko fights, where both players look for threats elsewhere to win the right to recapture, are some of the most exciting moments in the game.

○ Life: two eyes. An eye is an empty point surrounded by one player's stones. A group with two separate eyes can never be captured, because the opponent would have to fill both at once, and a stone played in either one alone would be suicide. On the left, the black group in the corner has two eyes, a and b. It's alive forever. On the right, the black group has only one eye, and it's in atari: White plays at a and captures all five stones.

● The end of the game. When neither player can find a useful move, each passes, and after two passes in a row the game is over. Stones that both players agree could not escape capture are removed as prisoners. Then you count: each player's score is the empty points he has surrounded (his territory) plus the prisoners he has taken. The higher score wins.

○ Komi and handicaps. Going first is an advantage, so in an even game White receives a few extra points, called komi. At our club we use 5½ on every size of board. The half point means there are no ties. When two players of different strength play, the weaker one takes Black and starts with extra stones already on the board, called handicap stones, usually one for each rank of difference, and then White gets only half a point of komi. A handicap game between a beginner and a strong player is a close, real game, and it's one of the loveliest things about go.

That's all of it. There are a few more fine points (there are several sets of official rules, and they differ in small ways in how they count), but they almost never change who wins, and you can learn them later.

These diagrams use the old notation from the go newsgroup: X is Black, O is White, a dot is an empty point. Columns are lettered from the left, skipping I so it isn't confused with J. Rows are numbered from the bottom. Numbers on the board are moves, in order. Black's moves are odd, White's are even.

1. The ladder. Here White has one stone, at C7, with Black stones above it and beside it. Black plays 1 and puts it in atari. White runs out with 2. Black ataris again from the other side with 3. White runs with 4, Black ataris with 5, White runs with 6...

    A B C D E F G H J
 9  . . . . . . . . .
 8  . . X X . . . . .
 7  . X O 2 3 . . . .
 6  . . 1 4 6 . . . .
 5  . . . 5 . . . . .
 4  . . . . . . . . .
 3  . . . . . . . . .
 2  . . . . . . . . .
 1  . . . . . . . . .

Notice the shape. Every time White runs, he gets no more than two liberties, and every time Black ataris, he's back down to one. The white stones march across the board in a staircase, and they're heading for the edge. Here's the end of it, twenty-three moves in all. At the edge, White ran out of room, and Black captured twelve stones at once with his last move, at J1:

    A B C D E F G H J
 9  . . . . . . . . .
 8  . . X X . . . . .
 7  . X . . X . . . .
 6  . . X . . X . . .
 5  . . . X . . X . .
 4  . . . . X . . X X
 3  . . . . . X . . .
 2  . . . . . . X X .
 1  . . . . . . . . X

The lesson: if you can see that a ladder works, don't run. Every move you add is another stone to lose. The exception is when one of your own stones is already sitting in the ladder's path. Then the staircase runs into it, the running group connects and picks up liberties, and the ladder fails, which is a disaster for the side that was chasing. Reading out whether a ladder works, before you play it, is one of the first real skills in go. It's just counting, very carefully.

2. Three in a row. Here a black group on the bottom edge has a space three points long. The middle point, marked *, decides everything.

. . . . .
O O O O O
X X X X O
. * . X O

If Black plays at *, the space becomes two separate eyes and the group lives. If White plays there first, Black can never make two eyes, and the group dies. Whoever gets there first wins the group. This is called a vital point, and in life and death there almost always is one. Look for it. It's usually in the middle of things.

3. Counting a finished game. Here's the end of a 9x9 game between two of our members last month. Both have passed. There are no dead stones to remove, and every neutral point has been filled in.

    A B C D E F G H J
 9  . . . . X O . . .
 8  . . . . X O O . .
 7  . . . . X X O . .
 6  . . . . X X O . .
 5  . . . . X O O . .
 4  . . . X X O . . .
 3  . . . X O O . . .
 2  . . X X O . . . .
 1  . . . X O . . . .

Count it with me. Black's territory, the empty points on the left surrounded only by black stones, is 31 points. White's territory on the right is 25. During the game each player captured three of the other's stones. So:

Black wins by half a point. Six points of territory ahead on the board, and it came down to a half. That's how close a well-played 9x9 game is. Every point matters. The two players shook hands, set the stones back in the bowls, and played again.

Go came to America mostly by way of Japan, so we use the Japanese words. You'll hear these at the club within the first ten minutes.

● Atari  A stone or group with only one liberty left, about to be captured. Between beginners it's polite to say "atari" out loud. Between experienced players it would be a little insulting.

○ Sente  A move your opponent has to answer. If you play in sente, you get to move again somewhere else afterward. "Having sente" means it's your turn and you're free to play anywhere.

● Gote  The opposite: a move that doesn't demand an answer, so your opponent gets to play where he likes. A gote move has to be worth more to be worth playing.

○ Joseki  A standard sequence of moves in a corner that's been worked out over centuries and is considered fair to both sides. Learning a few is useful. Memorizing many without understanding why is an old trap, and there's an old saying among go players that it will make you weaker, not stronger.

● Komi  Points given to White to make up for Black's first move.

○ Dame  (Two syllables, DAH-meh.) A neutral point that belongs to nobody. Dame get filled in at the end of the game.

● Seki  A standoff where two groups share liberties and neither player can attack without getting captured himself. Both live. It's rarer than you'd think and more beautiful.

○ Kyu and dan  The ranks. See our ratings page.