Name: Video Tutorial for the Game of Go - Part I, Overview (WeiQi, Baduk)
Uploaded: 2018-08-17T06:21:54.000Z
Duration: 8 min 25 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Welcome to the tutorial for the game of Go.

This is part one in which we will give you an overview of

how the game works, to introduce you to what Go is

This part is for anyone who's curious about Go;

if you plan to become a Go player yourself we recommend that you also continue on to

Go is at least three thousand years old and is the oldest board game still played.

It originated in China and from there spread through the rest

of Asia, where it has historically been considered one of the

four treasured arts that any cultured person should pursue.

a growing following in the western world as well.

And even after thousands of years of study

dedicated to the game, today's Go professionals

something of intricate and subtle beauty.

and some black stones, and some white stones.

The number of lines in the board can vary

On a board with nine lines in each direction

On a 13x13 board a game might take half an hour.

on which a game will probably take an hour, or more.

The player with the black stones plays first

not inside the squares like checkers or chess.

All the intersections on the board are valid points

including those on the sides and in the corners.

You'll see that some points have a dot on them;

but are there simply to help orient you to where you are on the board,

they don't have any special meanings in playing the game.

Once a stone is played on a point it doesn't move around,

it stays on the same point unless it gets captured,

You can think of Go as having three main rules.

When a stone is on the board the empty points

directly adjacent to it are called its "liberties".

Notice that we only count along the lines, not diagonally.

If an opponent's stone takes one of those spaces

the black stone now has three liberties, then two

(of course, in a game, white doesn't get to make all these

moves in a row; we're just illustrating the rule here)

When the last liberty is taken the stone is captured;

it's removed from the board and kept as white's prisoner.

Rule number two says that any stones of the same color

are counted together for the purposes of liberties.

So these two stones form one unit which has six liberties.

If they are all eventually filled in by the opponent's stones

the two black stones are captured as a unit.

Any number of stones that are on adjacent points

are treated as one unit. For instance, this is a single unit,

and if you count the liberties you'll see there are fifteen.

But again, we don't count diagonally as being adjacent.

For instance, these two stones have no special relationship in the game;

they're simply two single stones, each with the standard four liberties.

Rule number three says that when you play a stone

you count its captures before you count its liberties.

This sounds complicated but it's easy to understand once you see it work.

In this case black cannot play a stone in the center space of the white stones;

But if we surround the white group with black stones

Now the center space becomes the last white liberty.

When black plays there, by rule number three

the capture is counted first (after which, of course,

the new black stone has plenty of liberties.)

And that's pretty much it for the rules of the game

(aside from one special rule that we'll get to in part two);

everything else about Go follows from putting these

The foremost implication that derives from the three rules

unconditionally alive; by the rules of the game

there's nothing white can do to capture it.

This is because it has two separate empty spaces

that guarantee that these stones will always have a liberty.

White can't play a stone in either of the empty

spaces because the existence of the other empty

space means that the black stones still have a

liberty and therefore rule number three doesn't come into play.

We call these empty spaces "eyes", and this

brings up what's probably the basic tenet of Go:

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Video Tutorial for the Game of Go - Part I, Overview (WeiQi, Baduk)

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