Comeback
Despite a ten-year gap, the board with its nineteen lines crossing this way and that didn't feel so awkward in my hands.
Perhaps the knowledge and memory built up over decades of patience and pain, sweat and passion, didn't evaporate quite so easily after all.
The account I was logged into — my grandfather's — held an online rank of 7-dan. Rank on an internet Go server isn't a precise measure of skill, but it told me one thing for certain: at the amateur level at least, he played very well indeed.
His record was 1,047 wins and 1,089 losses. A win rate of just under fifty percent.
With a history that long, a handful of extra games wouldn't stand out no matter how they went.
I accepted a match request that had come in from a Chinese player.
Even games, with both sides assumed to be of equal strength — and a fast-clock rule granting only three periods of byo-yomi. Go acknowledges Black's advantage in moving first, so six and a half points of komi is normally deducted from Black's score. The exact figure varies by country and tournament, but it generally stays somewhere between five and a half and seven and a half points.
In handicap games, by contrast, where the players are assumed to differ by a single dan, the weaker player takes Black but receives no komi; in games where the gap is wider still, the weaker Black player simply places an appropriate number of stones on the board before play begins.
Go is a game you win by securing more territory — the empty intersections you claim for yourself — than your opponent. Territory is yours once you enclose it with your own living stones.
Since I had taken Black, I would win by leveraging the advantage of the first move to build more than seven points' worth of extra territory over White — and lose if I failed to do so.
My first move landed on the 3-4 point of the upper-right corner: a stone settled back one line from the star point at the fourth line, down onto the third. One of the eight points marked 3-4 in coordinate notation.
The fourth line is commonly called the line of influence; the third, the line of territory.
A stone on the fourth line is well positioned for expansion but lacks solidity, while a stone on the third line secures territory more reliably at some cost to its scalability.
The 3-4 point, then, could be said to strike a balance between the two.
My opponent answered on the star point of the diagonally opposite lower-left corner. My third move claimed the 3-4 point of the lower-right corner, and White filled the last remaining corner star point in reply.
There was no grand purpose behind it. It was simply that joseki arising from the star point tend to be simple, with few branching variations, while 3-4 point joseki are comparatively complex and endlessly mutable.
A professional hardened by years of hard-won experience and daily study can handle even the most difficult sequences with ease. An amateur is different.
Even one who has diligently memorized joseki loses their way far too easily the moment a little trickery enters the picture.
Joseki are the tested, optimized sequences distilled from Go's long history — the countless patterns that generations of play have led the Go world to agree benefit neither Black nor White.
They are the products that result when each side is assumed to play its very best moves.
Which is why knowing them alone saves an enormous amount of time and effort. Leaving the roads paved by the countless great players of history to strike out on a new path isn't forbidden by any means — but it burns considerable time and mental energy.
It would be wonderful if you could think everything through for yourself and find the best move — but in most cases, what you reach instead is one of those bad moves known as a fall-away.
In a real game, riddled with variables, play rarely proceeds exactly according to joseki. The reason to commit hundreds of patterns to memory anyway is precisely so you can recognize the moment it does.
Of course, ever since artificial intelligence arrived, even the sequences once considered optimal have shifted — and it has been definitively proven that joseki are not ultimate truths. So you consult them, but never lean on them.
Thirty moves. Forty. Naturally, my opponent flailed helplessly, scattering clumsy moves across the board.
The opening phase of a game, compared to war, is the stage of deploying your forces.
The stage of sketching the broad outlines — where, on what terrain, in what formation, and by what means you intend to fight.
Since no active battle has yet begun, victory and defeat can't be settled until armies meet. But when the difference in the commanders' ability is great enough, the outcome can be roughly read before a single engagement has been fought.
Even with equal numbers of soldiers, if a division that has entrenched itself solidly on high ground lines up against one milling about in disorder, unable to keep its ranks, it takes no genius to guess which side wins.
And if the disadvantaged side happened to be commanded by a strategic and tactical genius superior to his counterpart, he might overcome the inferior deployment — but what if it were the other way around?
Before we reached even a hundred moves, a sound effect burst from the speakers and my opponent's resignation flashed on screen.
The moment I bared my teeth, his ragged formation shattered, leaving wreckage in its wake.
This was perhaps seventy percent of my professional-era strength — or less — and this was all it took against an internet amateur.
Was it because, after tasting the depths of despair, I had finally let go of my obsession with Go?
Playing against someone several ranks below me, I felt no fatigue or tedium at all — only pure, unalloyed delight. When had I last enjoyed the game of Go this purely, for its own sake? I couldn't remember.
I had no idea when Grandfather might come back, so I would have to stop soon — but one more game couldn't hurt, surely.
Having surrendered to impulse and bargained myself into exactly one more game, I left the game room and went to the lobby, scanning for players with good records to send my match requests to.
Ryu Sangho, who had turned sixty-eight this year, opened the front door with both hands full of a shopping bag packed with side dishes.
His granddaughter, who had fallen asleep in the car yesterday, ought to be stirring by now — yet the house lay utterly silent.
His daughter had married a man who used an English surname, and their lovely granddaughter carried his daughter's family name instead. For her to sleep this late, yesterday must have worn her out completely.
Even he had been badly shaken by the news of his son-in-law's illness. How much harder it must have hit his young granddaughter. She had likely spent the whole day at the hospital, unable to rest easy, waiting — of course she was exhausted.
It broke his heart.
His chest ached at the sudden, crushing misfortune that had fallen on the family — but if he was to look after his granddaughter, he couldn't let himself dwell too deeply on his son-in-law's illness. All he could do was pray for a swift recovery, keep his worries to himself, and make sure the man received treatment unburdened, while caring for his granddaughter as well as he could.
Ryu Sangho exhaled a long breath to clear his head, then gently opened the door to the bedroom where his granddaughter had been lying, careful not to wake her.
But there was no sign of her anywhere.
"Seoa?"
Wondering if she had gone to the bathroom, he checked there, then the kitchen — no granddaughter, and the house was quiet as the grave.
The last place he found her was the study, the room where he did his reading and spent his leisure hours.
A small, blonde-haired girl was staring fixedly at the monitor, clicking away at the mouse.
She was so absorbed that she hadn't noticed him standing behind her.
Curious what could hold the child's attention so completely, he crept closer — and there it was: a Go game on the screen.
She must have woken to find him out, grown bored wandering the house, and stumbled upon the computer he'd carelessly left on.
He enjoyed playing Go online himself, but he never fussed much over wins or records, so even if his granddaughter had lost a few games on his account it wouldn't have mattered at all.
Still, he couldn't help wondering what kind of adorable Go game held her so rapt — and he began to study the match over her shoulder.
"…"
Contrary to his expectations, the arrangement of stones on the board was a distant galaxy away from adorable.
Complex. Puzzling. And, at the same time, beautiful enough to blind the eye.
He rubbed his eyes, wondering if this was a spectating screen — but where his granddaughter clicked, a stone appeared.
A dozen or so observers had gathered in the game room, and all of them were in a frenzy, hammering out chat messages at the spectacle unfolding before their eyes.
Her opponent was a well-known player whose name carried real weight — one he himself had spectated a few times and learned a move or two from.
The game was so lopsided that even without checking the territory count closely, the result was beyond all doubt.
He couldn't logically grasp how she had done it — but his granddaughter had crushed the internet strongman into the dirt.
Her opponent, clinging stubbornly in search of complications, watched every outrageous gambit he tried come crashing down cleanly, until there was nothing left but to surrender.
"Whew."
Only when the game ended did his granddaughter's focus dissolve, and she stretched her arms toward the ceiling, eyes still glued to the monitor.
As she unfolded that adorable little stretch, her eyes met his head-on.
"G-Grandpa?"
The girl stared at him in wide-eyed shock — but the one truly stunned in that moment was himself.
"Seoa. Come somewhere with me for a moment."
There was so much he wanted to ask — but first, he needed to confirm that what he had just witnessed was real.
And if it was, he already knew exactly where they were going.
Taking care not to startle her, he gently took the hand of his granddaughter — who was eyeing him with a nervous, guilty air — and led her away.