Between Wednesdays, there are two ways to get better: read, and play. Here's what the club recommends for both. The club library (eleven books in a milk crate under the table) lends any of these for a week at a time, on the honor system.

● Go for Beginners, by Kaoru Iwamoto. A professional's gentle introduction, written for Westerners. It starts with the rules and goes on into real strategy, with plenty of examples. If you read one book, read this one first.

○ The Second Book of Go, by Richard Bozulich. For when you know the rules and have played a few dozen games and want to know what you're actually supposed to be doing. It covers the opening, the middle game and the endgame in a sensible order. Several of us credit this book with getting us out of the 20s.

● Graded Go Problems for Beginners, by Yoshinori Kano. Four small volumes of problems, starting very easy and getting harder. Do a few every night. There is no faster way to improve. (See Erik, on the ratings page.)

○ In the Beginning, by Ikuro Ishigure. All about the opening on the big board: where to play first, and why. Read it after you've played some full-size games and wondered why the strong players start where they do.

● Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go, by Toshiro Kageyama. A professional writing for amateurs about why we lose, which turns out to be mostly that we don't do the basic things carefully. Funny, stern, and right. I reread it every summer.

The bookstores near campus can order any of these. The AGA also sells books at its tournaments, and its magazine, the American Go Journal, comes with membership.

You can play go on the Internet at any hour, against people anywhere in the world. Several of our members do, and I've watched Korean professionals play on my home computer at two in the morning. The two big servers are:

● IGS, the Internet Go Server. The oldest and the busiest, running since the early 1990s and now based in Japan. In the evening, our time, it's morning in Asia, and it's full of strong players from Japan and Korea. There are often professionals playing, and you can watch their games move by move.

○ NNGS, the No Name Go Server. Smaller, run by volunteers here in the United States, and free. A friendly place to start. Lots of Americans and Europeans.

How it works. You connect with telnet, the plain text program that comes with Windows and almost every other computer, to the server's address and port number. You pick a name, and the server shows you the board as rows of letters and dots, like the diagrams on our lesson, and you type your moves as coordinates (D4, Q16 and so on). It works, and some people still play that way, but it's hard on the eyes.

Better is a client program. A client connects to the server for you and draws a real board on the screen with real-looking stones. You click where you want to play, and it sends the move. There are clients for Windows, the Macintosh and Unix, most of them free, and the newer ones are written in Java and run on anything. Ask Erik or Loren on a Wednesday. They've tried them all, and they'll set one up for you on the laptop if you bring yours.

The addresses and port numbers for both servers, and a list of the current client programs, are in the go FAQ that's posted regularly to the newsgroup rec.games.go. The newsgroup itself is worth reading too, for game reviews, news from the professional tournaments, and arguments about the rules that have been going on for years.

A word about ranks online. Each server keeps its own ratings, and they don't match the AGA's or each other's. Don't worry about the number at first. Play people near your own strength, and say "hi" and "thank you" like you would across a real board. The good manners of go travel well.

But the best place to play is still across a real board from a real person, with the click of the stones. We'll see you on Wednesday.