Since many years Go is a popular game among businessmen in the Far East (China, Korea, Japan). Nowadays it keeps getting more popular also in the other regions of the world. Go is the game, which will help you develop your mind.
Go game – frequently asked questions
What is Go?
Go is a classic board game. It's being played by millions of people worldwide. It has a huge impact for the culture and mindsets of people living in the Far East.
Is Go hard to learn?
No, the game of Go is quite easy to learn. The rules are very simple. You can learn how to play Go within a few minutes.
Why should you play Go?
- To learn to solve problems;
- To develop logical and strategical thinking;
- To develop skills of making decisions within time limits;
- To improve at evaluating the risk and possible profits;
- To be better in adjusting the local situations into the global scene;
- To learn humility and patience;
- To have fun;
Summarizing, Go is the perfect game for businessmen and entrepreneurs. But basically everybody can get benefits from playing this game.
- Read more | Go (Baduk, Weiqi) and Business Thinking - Similarities
- Read more | Help of Go for Thinking Ability - Results of Scientific Research
Is Go complex?
Yes, it is a complex game. Despite the simple rules, Go has an extremely big number of possible variations. It’s possible to play more various Go games than the number of existing atoms in the Universe!
A modern proof of the complexity of Go has been a big struggle of artificial researchers to create a strong playing program. Other board games like chess got mastered by classical algorithms already in the '90s. However, in Go it was only in 2016 when new technologies (deep neural networks and Monte-Carlo tree search) made it possible to create a program which could beat professional players.
How many moves does it take to play a game of Go?
It’s possible to play very short and very long games. When one player resigns, the game can finish anytime. But to finish a game of Go by counting territory, the players will probably need to play about 200-250 moves.
However, you can find games, which are finished before the 150th move (and the territory is counted). But there are also games with more than 350 moves.
How long does a game of Go take?
Most of games played on amateur Go tournaments take about 1-2 hours. However, there are some blitz tournaments with a time limit of 10 minutes per player (if a player uses 10 minutes, he loses by time). On the other hand, there are also some professional Go tournaments like e.g. Kisei, where in the finals each player has 8 hours time limit!
Why is this game called Go?
Although Go comes from China, it has been showed in the ”western world” by the Japanese.
There are two names of Go in Japanese. One is 囲碁, which can be pronounced as ”Igo”, the other one is 碁, which can be pronounced as ”Go”. The 2nd name became more popular in Europe and got rooted in many of the European languages.
Are there any different names for the game of Go?
It’s possible to call the game of Go as ”weiqi”, which refers to 围棋 - it’s the name of Go in Chinese.
And it’s also possible to call it ”baduk”, which refers to 바둑 in Korean.
In the ”western countries” it’s quite common nowadays to use the Chinese and Korean names for the Go game, besides the Japanese one.
While speaking about this game, some non-Go players might connect the Go game to ”Pokémon Go”, ”CS:GO”, programming language ”Go” or even ”Go-Go dances”.
So, if you want to be on the safer side that you are not accidentally misunderstood by the person you are talking to, while speaking about the game of Go, you can also use names such as baduk and weiqi.
How to pronounce ”Go”?
Go should be pronounced with the phonetic ”o” (similar to ”o” in a word ”hot” in British English).
