GO
My Journey
I have been playing Go for 9 years. It is a traditional board game that has a long history stretching back more than a thousand years. (I’m not sure if you know AlphaGo, the AI that beat the best Go player a couple of years ago.) Like chess, Go has many ranking systems and my rank is the highest for a non-professional player. Go is such an elegant game. It is simple with only two kinds of pieces, white and black, while there are 361 stones on the board. The goal is to occupy more spaces than your opponent. It seems easy, but actually it has an unlimited number of possible positions that is far beyond calculation. So, you can only deduct the best move with your intuition and we train ourselves by polishing our intuition of strategy.
There is also a psychological mind game component of Go. You have to anticipate what your opponent is thinking and react to what plan he or she has in mind. Sometimes, it’s not even about the next move but rather the overall strategy, because everything may change halfway through the game. To improve my strategy planning skills, I analyze the games of professional players, memorize their chess manual and practice with myself using different moves. I also ask my coach to let other players play with me outside of school, and I ask both nonprofessional and professional players for advice as well. I cannot remember how many tournaments I have participated in and I have won and lost many, but I have learned quite a lot from it. I’m very grateful that Go has not only taught me to develop strategies, but has also given me the opportunity to start a league with my friends and spread my love for Go.
Nongshim Shin Ramen Cup World Baduk Match
1st Busan, Nagasaki, Shanghai Youth Go Exchange Tournament
2018 Tongzhou Cup International City Youth Go Invitational Tournament
League SAGES (Bimonthly)
Founder and Organizer
2018 - present
In 2018, I led the establishment of league SAGES (Shanghai Alliance of Go for Elite Students) and its organization comittee. It is a league open to all international school students in Shanghai. We hold the tournament once a year and it has become a platform that provides opportunities for all the Go players of the Shanghai International School to communicate. I am very lucky that I have met many friends through Go. When I found that more and more people around me started to learn playing Go, I thought I could build a platform for players to have the chance to communicate with each other. Furthermore, it was intriguing to promote this traditional Chinese chess art among foreign friends around me in the international school.
The league now consists of 16 teams . During the tournament, each team would play with one another once. And there are different international students from all around the world, such as New York, Toronto, Osaka, and so on. Setting up a tournament is definitely not an easy task. After I had the idea of establishing this league, I needed to find a student in every school to cooperate on this matter. I found Go players from other schools whom I knew and talked to them about my idea. Surprisingly, everyone was very welcome to it and thought it was really great. Then we gathered and had meetings once a week to work on it . We had lots of discussions and set up the rules and regulations for tournaments. In order to promote this league, I started a WeChat account to publicize the tournament so more people would participate. To cut down the expenses, I would usually ask our school to use its space for the tournament’s location and that requires a lot of communication and paperwork. After every competition, I would feel quite accomplished. I have a coach who is a relatively well-known Go teacher. She helped us a lot by utilizing her resources and inviting a volunteer judge.