My Personal Go History

As a schoolboy I was introduced to chess at about the age of 8, but soon afterward my family moved to another neighborhood and I lost contact with both the friend who had taught me and the game. After I graduated from The Bronx High School Of Science in January 1943 at age 15 I went to work for 6 months and then entered the NYU College of Engineering as a 16 year old, where my interest in chess was rekindled. I soon became fairly proficient - not quite strong enough to defeat the Captain of the NYU Chess Team, but good enough that he was willing to play with me on a regular basis. Back then, in common with most Americans (of even today!) I had never heard of Go, and not only was passionately in love with chess but believed completely the commonly held misconception that it was the superior of all other strategic board games.

My service in the US Navy during WWII interrupted my schooling, and only 2 months following my discharge in July 1946 I met my future wife and married her on November 1, 1947. Learning that I was a chess aficionado, her cousin gave me a copy of Edward Lasker's "Go And Go Moku" as a wedding present, and thereby began my ever increasing lifetime passion for and involvement in Go.

Back in those "dark ages", Lasker's less-than-satisfactory book was one of only two in English, the other being the long out-of-print Arthur Smith's 1908 "The Game Of Go", which itself was based heavily on the Korschelt "Das Go Spiele" of some 20 years earlier. Not long after I also came upon Lasker's "Appendix On Go" in his very popular "Modern Chess Strategy", but this contained even less actual content than his book, so obtaining any real information about more than the most rudimentary elements of Go was extremely difficult.

I graduated from NYU in 1948 with a BME, but it soon became apparent that jobs for young engineers were very scarce in the immediate post-WWII era, and I realized that obtaining more than a Bachelor's degree would be essential if I ever wanted to make my way in the field. So in 1950, still armed with the free education benefits provided by the "GI Bill", I again began my pursuit of higher education - this time at night, while working full time, and often with long commutes - a process that began with 5 nights per week plus a half day laboratory on Saturdays, and eventually tailed off 19 continuous years later to one night/week! I quickly achieved an additional BIE in 1952 and MIE in 1954 with induction into the Industrial Engineering Honor Society, but when I finally ended my formal studies in 1969 I had not managed to complete my Ph.D. in Operations Research.

But my studies at NYU had a completely unanticipated and serendipitous payoff! The NYU downtown campus at Washington Square in Manhattan at which several of my classes were scheduled is only a few blocks from the world famous Marshall Chess Club, where my much older cousin was a long time member. With his sponsorship I was able to join, and thereby gained a pleasant venue at which to fill the time before my scheduled 6-8 PM Friday night classes (carefully chosen because not only could I race home in time to catch "the Friday Night Fights " on TV, but could also "sleep in" the next morning instead of having to race off to work).

The serendipity? At that moment in time, the tiny New York Go Club met in the main playing room at the Marshall on Monday nights, so their equipment and literature was available for my perusal. Thus, for the first time, I had some (however peripheral) contact with real Go players and more sophisticated Go literature. To make things even better Edward Lasker himself was a member of both clubs, so I actually had the opportunity to play a game of Go with him.

In 1952, based upon the recommendation of Elizabeth Morris, then Secretary of the American Go Association (AGA), I imported my traditional table Go board and slate-and-shell stones from Japan, purchasing only intermediate quality. Ah! If I had only known then what I know now I'd have obtained a Kaya Tenchimasa board and the 10 mm stones! But hindsight is always 20/20, and we can only do the best we can with the knowledge available at the time.

Soon thereafter I joined the New York Go Club and the AGA, but during the 19 years that I attended graduate school at night while working full time and raising a family there was precious little time for Go, so I had to learn what I could from the American Go Journal, and, beginning in 1956 with the publication of Takagawa's "How To Play Go" by the Nihon Kiin, from the slowly growing number of Go books in English. Even though I was little more than a beginner myself, most of my actual Go playing throughout those years was obtained while teaching those few of my engineering co-workers that I could interest. The only significant advantage of this was my early exposure to playing White and being the handicap giver - a complete reversal of the typical beginner's syndrome of playing Black and receiving large handicaps from experienced players. For this reason, I've always been free of the passive, defensive, almost frightened mental set of the conventionally trained beginner, and comfortable with (if not necessarily fully proficient in) the more balanced and aggressive style needed in even game play.

Throughout this period and well beyond, "grubbing a living" for my family naturally took precedence in my life, with the consequence that I was only able to manage an (estimated) average of perhaps 10 or so games/year against stronger players. Fortunately, among those rare events was my participation in a number of Friday night simultaneous games at the New York Go Club by former Honinbo Kaoru Iwamoto during the period when he was living in New York City.

With the appearance of the Ishi Press in the 1960's, more advanced Go literature in English designed for beginning/intermediate players became available for the first time, so it finally became possible for me to truly begin to learn Go via independent study - something that I was quite experienced with and good at as a result of my decades of graduate study. Almost entirely in this way, with almost no over-the-board play, I was able to raise my rank to 5 Kyu (AGA).

Almost immediately after my first exposure to the early issues of The American Go Journal (AGJ) at the Marshall CC, I recognized that the combination of the immense scope of the Go board and its accompanying profound strategy, plus spectacular and incisive tactics that were fully comparable to those of chess, made it the far superior game. At the same time, I began taking advantage of my early class time on Friday nights to return to the Marshall to compete in their weekly Friday night "Rapids" tournament. In those events, playing against Masters and Grandmasters, including several US and US Open champions, I never received less than an even score, regularly beating all but the best players but equally regularly losing to the champions!

From this, it was clear that if I put forth a real effort I could become a really good Chessplayer, but despite this as time progressed I increasingly lost interest in chess, ultimately continuing to play it only as a mechanism for attempting to convert Chessplayers to Go! My reasoning was that if I beat them soundly at chess it would be difficult for them to dispute my contention that Go was its superior. During this period, while an engineer at RCA in New Jersey, I became RCA Chess Champion and founded the Tri-County Industrial Chess League of New Jersey. But I soon discovered the phenomenon that Edward Lasker had encountered 50 years earlier in Germany - that almost all chess players were almost completely resistant to even the idea of another game, and that this resistance extended to include even chess variants like Xiang Qi (Chinese Chess) and Shogi (Japanese Chess). Eventually, this resistance overcame even my own energy and optimism, and, lacking any real reason to continue with it I finally ceased playing chess altogether!

For a number of years before this final end to my "career" as a chess player, I continued to play chess only as a vehicle to assist me in introducing chess players to Go. My rationale was simple - merely telling them that Go was superior to chess without some proof that I knew what I was talking about was patently ineffectual, and would be met with incredulity and disbelief. But if I could soundly defeat them at chess - well, then what I said about the relative merits of the two games would at least receive a polite, respectful hearing! It was for this reason that in 1969, while an executive at General Foods Headquarters in White Plains, NY I played the simultaneous chess exhibition against all of 15 of the members of the GF Research Center's chess club depicted in the photo reproduced below from the GF Candid company newspaper (that's me on the left). As an aside, Larry Russ, one of my opponents in this simul is now Dean of Undergraduate Academics at Stevens Institute Of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., and a dedicated Go player! (For which I believe that I deserve credit!)

As noted above, since almost the very moment that I first discovered Go I recognized its very special attributes and determined to attempt to make it better known in America. Although I began this effort modestly, by trying to interest those in my milieu - primarily engineers and other chessplayers, I soon realized that there was little prospect of making any significant impact if I limited myself to such a personal scale, so I tried to use my ingenuity to devise ways if expanding my reach beyond my immediate environment. In pursuit of this goal, for several years in the 1970's I authored a regular Go column in the American Mensa Bulletin, in the belief that people with high IQ would naturally be attracted to Go because of its obvious intellectual challenges. But to my utter amazement my column elicited almost no interest, with the result that I eventually not only stopped writing it but then dropped out of Mensa altogether! (As another aside here, in 1999 I again rejoined Mensa on the off chance that things might be different after the passage of so much time, and the far greater penetration of Go into American society. Well! After giving one of my free lecture/demonstrations to the members of Long Island Mensa, I discovered to my sorrow that nothing much had changed, so I've once again dropped out!)

Perhaps my most interesting idea for spreading Go came to fruition at just about this same time, when I arranged and participated in a Go demonstration in the front window of the upscale Takashimaya Department Store on New York City's famous Fifth Avenue at 43 Street, as the accompanying photo shows. I'm the guy in the white sweater on the left without the beard - something that I later added to my own physiognomy on my retirement as a declaration of independence!

This was the scene on New York's famous Fifth Avenue

when I played Go in the front window of the Takashimaya Department Store,

before a large crowd of onlookers.

Since my retirement in 1986 I've nominally had the advantage of more time to study Go, and with the effective completion of my new primer GO FOR KIDS, for the first time ever I've had the luxury of concentrating on my own game rather than always thinking of what the juvenile beginner's perceptions and misperceptions are and how to best present the rudiments of Go to optimize their enjoyment and learning rate. But this has naturally been offset by my advancing age - at this latest update a few months after my 75^th birthday. Until about 8 years ago, I still found it feasible to play in an occasional AGA tournament, and raised my official rating to 1 Dan despite several quite gratuitous losses in games that I had easily "won" (but don't we all have this problem?).

For about 3 years now I have now been playing on the internet, almost exclusively on IGS, although most of my time there has been spent watching strong players (primarily in the former 1 d* - 4 d* range, now the 4 d* - 7 d* range), trying to anticipate their moves and puzzling over why their selections differed from mine when they frequently did. The was a consequent increase in my ability to predict their moves and a surge in confidence in my ability to play, and this was justified because I can now play on equal terms with players who could (and sometimes did) give me 3 stones only a few months before! At the same time I have experienced strangely mixed results. Playing at my normal "tournament speed" of 45/10, on my good days I see the entire board with crystal clarity, have easily defeated former 2 k* (now 2 d*= AGA 4D) players, and lost by only a half point to a then 1 k* (AGA 5D+). But on my bad days I've lost to 4 k* and even 5 k* (now 1 k*- 2 k*) players! It seems that I almost invariably get a fine Fuseki (full board opening), but then tend to let down when it seems that an "easy" win is in the offing! My unfortunate tendency is also to play somewhat faster than my reading skill will sustain, and then to err as a result. Using this account as "philonist" I'm now officially a 1 d* (approx. AGA 2-3 D).

The problem with 45/10 is that the culture of IGS favors much faster games, so that finding opponents willing to play the relatively "serious" games such tournament speed implies is severely limited. So, reluctantly at first, I started a new account ("Solon") as a 5k (now 2k), playing exclusively at 1/10 speed, but at that speed my tendency to let down when ahead has become even more prominent! I later also started a couple of other 1/10 accounts which I use for experimenting with various strategies.

About two years ago an influx of new, very strong players (many top ranked professionals playing anonymously) joined IGS and pushed everyone else's ratings down by at least 1 full stone! For example, Solon was pushed back down to a 5 k* rating from a high of 3 k*- a full 2 stones weaker. But it seems that the IGS administrators finally recognized this ratings deflation and decided to do something to correct it, with the result noted elsewhere in this site that as of May 19, 2002 all IGS ratings were increased by approximately 3 stones! The result is that philonist is now 1 d* and Solon is 2 k*.

Most recently, I've been too busy creating a Reasoning course for my local Five Towns College (based on the page in this web site "Teaching The New 'R' of Reasoning" to play much at all. But hopefully sometime in the not too distant future I'll have all of this worked out and will be able to either jettison the Solon account or work it back up to 1 d* while continuing to play at 1/10. In the interim, my main experimental account ("aspirant") is now at 2 k*.

Retrospectively reviewing what may euphemistically be termed my Go "career"as outlined herein, I am struck by how few games I've actually played in over 50 years. I estimate the total now on the order of 1500, of which fully 800 - 1000 were contested since my retirement 16 years ago, and until I began playing on IGS 99% of those were against a single opponent who was slightly weaker than I am - a far from optimal scenario. Of the remaining 500 or so games, contested over the preceding 35 years, the vast majority were played against much weaker players, most often my own pupils. Given this average of slightly less than 15 games/year for most of this extended period, almost all against weak opposition, and especially given the "distraction" provided by my 19 years of almost full time night Grad school study, I believe that the progress that I made was quite remarkable.

It is only natural to speculate on how much stronger I might be now had I begun earlier, had more time for Go, better opposition, better study materials early on, or had IGS available back then. Of course, it is always possible that the result might have been exactly the same and that I've reached my ultimate potential despite all, but I'd prefer to believe that's not true. This seems especially so because it is apparent that, despite my now being 75, my playing strength has improved noticeably over the last year or so, although that hasn't been reflected in my results because it seems that the entire world Go population has also improved about the same amount in that time! Although we'll never really know what might have been, of course, I'm comforted by the realization that my first priority was always to do what was best for my family. So I have no regrets, only thankfulness at having discovered in Go one of the highlights of my life, next only to my family and my love of classical music. If this web page similarly inspires someone else, I will be well satisfied.

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