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June 3rd, 2005

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9×9 sets for sale

UPDATE: As of 26 August 2008, these 9×9 sets are no longer available.

If you want to buy a 9×9 set and you are in the Cape Town / Stellenbosch area, they’re going for R30 R40 each, and include stones in bowls (same stones as you get with the Korean sets), 78 Korean stones (39 of each colour) in a single bowl, as well as a laminated paper board with information on the Stellenbosch Go Club and useful website addresses for improving your Go on the back of the board. Great for getting started with the game or teaching new players.

Anyone interested can leave a comment with contact details, or e-mail Hugo van der Merwe.

Posted by Hugo in Announcements

3 Comments »

This entry was posted on Friday, June 3rd, 2005 at 8:45 am and is filed under Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

3 Responses to “9×9 sets for sale”

  1. Hugo says:

    Also possible: sets without bowls, if you want to buy your own bowl. Or just stones, if you want to print and laminate your own board (I can mail the pdf).

    The board I typically print is “standard size”. Considering the Korean sets are slightly smaller, I have wondered if I should make some smaller boards to suit the stones better…

    June 8th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
  2. Hugo says:

    Why 78 (and not 80)?

    – Korean sets aren’t guaranteed to have 160 stones of each colour, I’ve seen a Korean set with 159, I think. I divide these sets into 4.

    – I’ve seen kids not content to stop playing at first capture (capture game), so I’m opting for encouraging “don’t keep prisoners (Chinese style), winner is the first person to run out of stones”. I.e. if you can get all your stones on the board, you win. With 39 stones and two eyes, your area is 41, just over half the board.

    This method of teaching is effectively the ancient stone-counting method, i.e. there is a “group tax”, having more than one group is effectively “penalized”. I think it is a good way to learn/teach though: simple, effective, people discover eyes for themselves quite easily, as well as the importance of staking claim to large territories in which to place stones later. As they improve, you can then teach them the “beauty of omission”, they learn about the development of go through history. (1: Let’s not waste time by filling in the territory, 2: drop the group tax, 3: since we play Japanese rules in South Africa, show them then that keeping prisoners and counting territory is the same as counting area.)

    Comments?

    June 8th, 2007 at 4:03 pm
  3. Steve says:

    I’m also opting for teaching with Chinese rules (and group tax) these days. It avoids introducing the territory concept early on, which I’ve found tends to scare people off.

    “Hmm. The aim of that game is to make territory. Except they don’t seem to clear on what territory really is…

    Psychos.”

    June 11th, 2007 at 7:55 am

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