Why Go is Going Nowhere (economist.com) 58
Go, the ancient board game that China, Japan and South Korea all claim as part of their cultural heritage, is struggling to expand its global footprint because the three nations that dominate it cannot agree on something as basic as a common rulebook.
When Go was registered with the International Mind Sports Association alongside chess and bridge, organizers had to adopt the American Go Association's rules because the East Asian trio failed to reach consensus. In 2025, China's Ke Jie withdrew from a title match at a Seoul tournament after receiving repeated penalties for violating a rule that the South Korean Go association had introduced mid-tournament. China's Go association responded by barring foreign players, most of them South Korean, from its domestic competitions.
It also doesn't help that the game's commercial appeal is fading. Japan's Nihon Ki-in, the country's main Go association, has started exploring a potential sale of its Tokyo headquarters. Young people across the region are gravitating toward chess, shogi, and video games instead.
When Go was registered with the International Mind Sports Association alongside chess and bridge, organizers had to adopt the American Go Association's rules because the East Asian trio failed to reach consensus. In 2025, China's Ke Jie withdrew from a title match at a Seoul tournament after receiving repeated penalties for violating a rule that the South Korean Go association had introduced mid-tournament. China's Go association responded by barring foreign players, most of them South Korean, from its domestic competitions.
It also doesn't help that the game's commercial appeal is fading. Japan's Nihon Ki-in, the country's main Go association, has started exploring a potential sale of its Tokyo headquarters. Young people across the region are gravitating toward chess, shogi, and video games instead.
Plus the programming language is worthless!! (Score:1, Funny)
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Mahjong (Score:5, Insightful)
Mahjong has so many regional variants that it would make your head spin. And in most places, especially China, people often insist their variant is the truest form. But yet Mahjong is not in decline, it's actually thriving. I think comparing everything to Chess, where it has been standardized for a relatively long time, is a mistake. Standardization is not really a barrier to getting a global footprint for a game (or sport), not for casual play and not for tournaments. Offering an interesting experience and an enthusiastic fan base is about the only requirement.
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But yet Mahjong is not in decline, it's actually thriving.
Post-kiddush gaming is keeping it afloat in the US.
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European Mahjong is growing with the younger generation too.
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The differences between Mahjong variants are much larger than the differences between Go variants.
The differences between Go variants won't even come up at all in 99% of the games, specially not at amateur level. If I'm playing a friendly game someone new I won't ask what rules we are playing with because it won't matter, even if he thinks we are playing Chinese rules I think we are playing Japanese rules it won't actually matter until possibly the last few moves of the game and only even then if the game i
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I prefer Washizu Mahjong.
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Its like a lot of traditions. You can start a bar fight in Italy by making a declaration that your local recipe for bolognese sauce is the true one. And an israeli friend once joked to me that the REAL reason the Israel and Palestinians cant get their shit together and find peace is because they cant agree on who makes the best Humus.
At least with us Irish we can all agree that our traditional cuisine is terrible lol
Re: Mahjong (Score:2)
Was Michigan even competing for that one?
I feel like apple cider and cherry pie are the events Michigan would enter.
Re: Mahjong (Score:1)
How dare you leave Idaho off that list.
WE ARE EVERYTHING SPUD!
Grandma farts in your general direction.
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Chess has become more popular in the West, in part, because they've found a way to make it accessible and appealing to beginner and intermediate players.
When I was a kid in the 80s, it seems like most of the major newspapers had a "chess column"... but these were devoted to coverage of games between grandmasters. If you weren't already a dedicated player, you wouldn't have a good time reading the chess column. It was like reading about quantum physics. But even I can follow a GothamChess video about two
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9x9 and 13x13 are fun, I don't have the attention span for full Go.
there's always Gomoku, which I guess you can play using a Go set, but I've only ever played it on paper like dots and boxes.
Re: Mahjong (Score:2)
There are two things that have made chess a TV sport in Norway: Magnus Carlsen, and pila. SJÃ... PILA!
Live commentary on rapid and blitz games, heavily informed by the arrow (pila) giving real time evaluations from Stockfish. Even if we can't see what the player did wrong, the knowledge that there's a devastating response to the move just made makes watching it a lot of fun.
Oh, the game (Score:2)
Reading the title I thought we'd have another Tiobe controversy and almost prepared the popcorn.
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An I want congratulate the slashdot editors on pulling such a clever clickbait.
'I said, “Die, heretic!” And I pushed (Score:5, Insightful)
"China's Ke Jie withdrew from a title match at a Seoul tournament after receiving repeated penalties for violating a rule that the South Korean Go association had introduced mid-tournament."
Really didn't think I would care enough about this topic to take sides. But changing the rules in the middle of the game is the textbook example of unfairness.
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It's Asia, Confucius allowed the rule change! /s
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https://usgo.org/content.aspx?... [usgo.org]
The rules infringement occurred the following Jan 22.
Nope (Score:3)
There's nothing stopping western interest in Go. Regardless of whether they use American rules, or a dozen different rules, Go could expand. It does not expand due to a lock of interest. It simply does not appeal to the average westerner, for reasons that I can't explain, but are not related to rule sets.
Westerners also don't much care for abacus. But, Asians don't seem to have a lot of interest in Dominoes. Different cultures, steeped in different traditions, have different interests. And that's OK!
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I've heard one speculation that westerners find the uniformity of go too bland, as opposed to the interesting variety of movement found in chess pieces.
Re: Nope (Score:2)
My guess would be that it's much harder to tell who's winning in Go. Chess gives you clearer feedback.
I only play ... (Score:3)
... by Systems Commonwealth rules.
C forever! (Score:2)
Ok, so that's not the "go" the article is talking about.
Go, the game, should catch on IMHO. I find it to be much richer than chess, both to play and to watch. Also, it has a kickass manga to go with it, so what's not to love?
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Back on topic, is Go basically a rounder version of Othello?
Re:C forever! (Score:4, Interesting)
Both are played with white and black stones, but they play very differently. In go your object is to surround territory. If a group of stones is completely surrounded, then they are captured and taken off the board and counted toward your score. You can place a stone anywhere on the board so long as that stone has at least one liberty (a blank spot next to it or next to a line of adjacent stones of the same color) and so long as you don’t recreate a prior board position with the same player to play.
So really, the rules are simpler than Othello but the play is much more challenging. You get all sorts of abstract battle field type tactics, building supply chains, making converging forces, all sorts of stuff.
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You can not move a stone.
The rules differences are not really important, if 2 players outside of a tournament sits down to play a game they will not discuss before starting what rules to use, they will just play because in 99% of the games it won't matter.
The main differences are that there are 2 types of scoring, Area and Territory but outside special situations that might be ruled differently (bent 4 in a corner) you are looking at at most 1 point difference in score between them.
The other is how certain
"Commercial appeal" (Score:2)
I reckon it's hard to preserve the "commercial appeal" of a game you could play on a desert island with a bunch of rocks.
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Nah, once you get into it you start wanting luxury rocks. Thick kaya wood boards with their own legs with shell and slate stones that make the "pa-chick" sound just so. Oh, and that kaya board needs to have the bottom hand carved by a master to get just the perfect resonance. Well worth the $3,000.00 price tag! (Provided you have someone to play with on the regular.)
But alas, I do not have a go playing friend. At least not in meat space. So I have a few cheap boards and play online.
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That's true of Checkers/Drafts and yet it still has a sizable fan base and businesses have no problems selling sets.
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Really? If you told me you spent more than $2 on a checkers set, my eyebrows would raise. I reckon most people get theirs from their parents' attic.
Say again? (Score:5, Interesting)
"a rule that the South Korean Go association had introduced mid-tournament."
What. The. Hell.
Re:Say again? (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the Wikipedia article on the controversy [wikipedia.org]. Looks like the tournament began in May 2024 and the new rules were updated in November 2024 and the finals were in January 2025. The complaint of the Chinese was that the rule change shouldn't be retroactive for the whole tournament. But it's not like it was a last minute change during a game, but during a long tournament. And the rule update was on where captured stones should be placed.
From the article:
In November 2024, the Korean Baduk Association revised its rules, requiring that captured stones be placed on the lid of the Go bowl. A first violation results in a 2-point penalty, while a second violation leads to an automatic loss. These rules were communicated to the Chinese side before the Samsung Cup in November 2024.
One of the major controversies of the 29th LG Cup was the retroactive application of the new rules, which were implemented in November 2024, even though the tournament began in May 2024. According to sports event conventions, rules should not apply retroactively to events that started before their implementation. The penalties imposed during the final were deemed unreasonable by many.
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I think that the complaints of the Chinese are perfectly valid, especially if they applied the rule retroactively. That means he ate penalties for action that were legal at the time. The US constitution and many legal systems explicitly ban this.
Also, rules should stay the same during a tournament short of either a crazy game ruining exploit or serious safety problem. Fix the rule between tournaments.
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TL;DR: Duration of a contest does not make changing the rules mid contest, any less vexing to the players.
Re: Say again? (Score:2)
They should have a Magnus Carlsen who can call bulldog on rules which have nothing to do with the game like what pants you're allowed to wear. Where to place a captured stone? Good lord. As long as they don't flick them at the other tables they should be fine.
Finally Fizzbin (Score:1)
gets a shot at the big-time...except on Tuesdays.
Sad (Score:1)
This is a shame. I suppose those tensions show up even in the naming: Go, Baduk, Weiqi. It's such an elegant, layered game. Who knows, maybe some things are better staying a little bit niche? I thought it was going to have more of a moment after The Surrounding Game and AlphaGo.
That explains a lot (Score:2)
It's been said that world leaders who play Go are more formidable than those who play chess. Now I understand why.
As intelligence declines what depends on it do too (Score:2)
it's only logical
go figure
Seems to be typical american attitude ... (Score:2)
Everything has to expand, otherwise it is no good.
So everyone who is not playing a board game has to play, Go, Chess, Halma, Majong, Checkers ...
And if none of the games gets an increase in players, it sucks. If it gets an increase in players, the other games suck ...
Ridiculous.
Commodore 64 Go (Score:1)
Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I learned to play Go and spent many hours doing just that.
https://archive.org/details/Go... [archive.org]
What a fascinating game.
I haven't actually played it in years now. Maybe it's time to crank up vice and give it another... *cough* go.
rules variants include 'area or territory' (Score:5, Informative)
Given the main article was paywalled, here's a summary of Go variations. Besides the minor stuff like 'where to put captured stones, cup or side', there's one fundamental difference: Whether to count area (count every stone towards score, aka Chinese counting) or territory (count empty points within your territory, aka Japanese counting).
This article is great, gives an overview plus specifics on 6 different rule sets in use: gomagic.org [gomagic.org]
No, Go is great (Score:1)
Not only do the ruleset differences rarely matter, but they're usually agreed upon before a game starts on most go servers.
Go does have a barrier to entry though: Its tremendous complexity dwarfs that of even western chess, despite Go's simpler rules.
Now I'll go back to looking for a copy of The Match on DVD or Bluray: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The problem is skill matching (Score:2)
You can't mention Go without also mentioning AlphaGo the AI that finally beat human players. in this multi-award winning documentary you'll find out a lot about Go and just how hard the game is at the professional level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
you'll also
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Inherent racism (Score:2)
organizers had to adopt the American Go Association's rules because the East Asian trio failed to reach consensus
So, the US has been using its own rule set, but nevertheless the failure to agree on an international rule set is solely the fault of those quarrelsome East Asians.
Well, there's always competitive Scrabble ... (Score:2)
... which is a mixture of intense memorization, a few lookahead moves, and
some tile-counting (rather like card-counting for Blackjack).
However, there are two basic forks for tournaments, the North American
vs. British/International wordlist (~190,000 vs. ~270,000 words). The latter
contains more inflections, archaic words (incl. many more 2- and 3-letter words),
and international terms, 15-letters maximum.
See the captivating book "Word Freak", by participatory journalist Stefan Fatsis,
written in an immersive s
Which way? (Score:2)
Which way can I go [youtube.com]?
I don't enjoy wayching people play board games (Score:2)
I don't enjoy watching people play video games either.
Sometimes I enjoy watching people play sports, but only when I have a beer and a hotdog in my hands while chatting with my friends in the bleachers and shouting light insults at the umps and opposing team's players. On TV? Please, no. Same things over and over. Yes, I can recognize a good play, but so what?
Thus, chess and go as spectator sports boggle my mind.
If people want to play them, I've no issue. I don't enjoy them or any other board game myse
Most sports and games have this type of variance (Score:2)
Olympic basketball follows a different rule set than NBA basketball, which is different than US college basketball, which is different from European basketball. The NFL has different rules than college football, which are different still from high school football.
These rule variations don't keep these sports from being popular around the world, nor do they prevent these sports from having cross-border or work-level competitions.
The whole premise seems a little lazy to me.