Playing Go

Back in my old college days, I was one of those students who really enjoyed the social aspect of my education. So instead of going to all those boring classes, I spent my time in the cafetaria, playing all kinds of games, like bridge, chess, all kinds of card games, and go. Who needs classes when you can stimulate your intellect by having so much fun playing games?

Go was one of my favorite games, and I spent quite a lot of time playing and studying it. I even entered in some tournaments, not that I ever won anything, but it was fun. Then my college time was over, and life hit, and somehow I didn't get to play much go anymore. Until a few weeks ago, when I dug up my old board and stones and started playing again.

My family has a few go players, but none of them has the obsession with the game I have, so I soon ended up looking around on the trusted internet. And lo and behold, there is a whole on line go world out there! After some experimenting, we discovered that we could get Kiseido to work with our firewall. Which enabled me to suddenly play against tons of strong go players, and a bunch of go robots, which was less embarrassing to try to figure out my right rank :-)

Late every night, I log on to the server and get my daily go fix. Even better, I found a real life go 'club' close to home, and I went there for the first time today. What fun. Two nice go players, both of them way stronger than I am, but they took pity on me and gave me 9 stones handicap. I ended up winning the game, but it's kind of hard to lose with 9 handicap. Especially since my opponent was playing two games simultaneously. It just was so much fun to play against real humans face to face, as opposed to at the computer.

So yet another obsession has entered my life. I guess it's good to have something to do in the winter, when it's harder to geocache. At least I still got my daily walk in, and I have also started doing some yoga, not much, but it's a start.

Now I just have to make sure that Sylvia doesn't eat those nice, tasty go stones :-)