I've blogged before about how my oldest son likes to play chess while my youngest son prefers shogi (Japanese chess). I like both, but I am always reminded that I don't entirely understand shogi very well when he beats me easily even though I am actually trying. Chess I'm definitely not great at, but I can hold my own, but shogi I just suck at.

Realizing his old man just isn't quick to grasp the Japanese game, my youngest has started playing chess a bit. He's picked it up wonderfully fast and can already beat his older brother easily and can even challenge me. I don't know if shogi taught it to him or if it is a inborn skill, but he is very good at planning a few moves ahead.

He always looks at me and grins and says:

Papa, I'm gonna trap you

His brother meanwhile has never grasped the need to plan and just plays move-to-move. Which is why his younger brother can already beat him. That is the typical way people play, I know, and is why most people aren't very good at the game. I still find do it myself sometimes and make some very dumb blunders as a result. Luckily 40 years of playing the game has given me enough experience to usually recover when I'm not playing against someone really good.

^{Via Wikipedia}

The other day he was looking through some of my things that are packed away in the closet and he saw a Go board. Go has some degree of popularity in the West, so some of you may have heard of it or seen it. It's relatively popular in Japan, though a distant second to shogi. A few years ago there was a popular manga that featured Go (called Hikaru no Go) and that gave the game a small boom. I think things have settled back down from then, as it is a hard game.

I don't know if it is still true, but a few years ago I read that computers had easily mastered chess and shogi. Shogi is a little more complex than chess, so there was more work before computers could master it, but they eventually did. But Go is so complex that computers still can't even beat average players.

Well that was a few years ago. Given how fast AI is advancing, it may have mastered Go too by this point. But just the fact that it may have taken so much longer than it did for chess and shogi speaks to how much more complicated the game is.

Whereas in chess and shogi you can stumble forward to some extent without any planning, with Go planning is required or you will almost certainly not get far. You have to plan many moves ahead or you will be defeated easily.

I'll leave it to you to look up the rules if you are interested, but basically if you surround a piece on all four sides, you win that piece. Sounds simple, but there is a lot of strategy involved, as you quickly find out when you start playing.

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Anyway, I explained the basics of the game to my son. He picked it up almost instantly and was not only playing well, but was already showing that he grasped the planning part and was forming a strategy in his mind to beat me.

Papa, I'm gonna trap you.

I have no doubt that if we keep on Go, he will soon be regularly beating me. He just has that kind of mind. Good for him!

Incidentally, some trivia for you.

1. In Go, when you place a piece (called a "stone") that puts your opponent in a position where they only have one move left (called a "liberty") or their stone will be captured, you say "atari" (当たり), meaning "strike". Nolan Bushnell was a huge Go fan and so when he founded his video game company, he named it Atari. Atari would of course go on to define video games in the West for the 70s and early 80s until Nintendo came along.
2. Go comes from China, but it was adopted by Japan long ago and the modern rules developed in Japan. It spread to the world from Japan and Japan dominated international play for a very long time. As a result, the untranslated terms in the game (like atari) are Japanese and not Chinese.

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David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.