Learn to Play Go: A Master's Guide to the Ultimate Game (Volume I) (Learn to Play Go Series)

A Master's Guide to the Ultimate Game. The award-winning first book in the Learn to Play Go series by Janice Kim 3 dan and Soo-hyun Jeong 9 dan, two masters of the 4,000-year-old Asian game of strategy. Takes the complete beginner step-by-step all the way to playing real Go in fourteen chapters that can be read in 10-15 minutes each, each with a try-it-yourself section at the end. Suitable for kids, demystifies the learning process for adults.

Customer Reviews:

Where's the beef? - clear, but lacking in content

By W. Poon - July 7, 2000

I don't get the superlative praises which have been lavished on this book. I became interested in Go recently, and if you've played the game at all, you realize very quickly that knowing the rules alone doesn't get you very far in terms of figuring out how to play it! Given that, I was looking for a beginner's book which goes beyond teaching the rules - which are fairly simple anyway, but also imparts enough guidance and insights in terms of strategy and tactics that a beginner would start to feel comfortable about playing it - what to look for, how does one approach different phases of the game, etc. Perhaps this is too much to ask of a single beginner book to Go, but I found this book particularly lacking in that regard relative to others of its kind. I didn't come away after finishing it feeling much more confident about knowing how to play the game as when I started reading it. I've browsed through Iwamoto's(?) "Go for Beginners" and found it to be a more... read more

A Good Move for Beginners

By Marc Ruby™ "The Noh Hare™" - August 14, 2002

This is the first book is a series of four (as of 2002) which are intended to help a potential player go from a complete beginner to a reasonable competent amateur. This is no trivial undertaking, for the simplicity of Go's rules hide and incredible complexity of play. Not only are bad habits hard to undo, but the gap between the lower levels of play are so large that it can be very discouraging to climb the first few hills.What Janice Kim and Jeong Soo-hyun have done here is to present the central ideas of the game in a careful, step-wise manner that is readable by anyone from about nine years old on. If a parent were willing to take the time, he or she could use this book to learn enough to teach a much younger player. Yet the information presented is still substantial, covering the basics of life, forming territory, capturing, connecting, and Ko fighting. I hate to admit it, but I found a thing or two in it that I had forgotten. Frequent examples and questions are... read more

Great Beginner's Book!

By John Raggio - December 6, 1999

I just finished reading Janice Kim's book, "Learn to Play GO" for the second time. It is fantastic. I bought the book based on a suggestion from somebody on the Yahoo game server. It's actually a funny story. I started playing the game after reading the rules very quickly. The rules I read made no mention of eyes. This, as you all know, caused me great pain when playing. I lost a 9x9 game 81-0. My opponent offered, "Do you want some advice?" I said, "Sure." His reply was simply, "Buy Learn to Play Go by Janice Kim." I bought it the next day and have since bought four more copies as gifts for friends. It's actually just a ploy on part to get more people to play with. ;-)