“People only learn from mistakes when they are hurt by them” says Fujivara no Sai. I disagree. At the Go Teaching Ladder, you can learn from other people’s mistakes. In contrast, I don’t seem to learn from my own, even when they hurt – at least in Go.

A place where Go players can learn and teach at their leisure.

During my current Go (igo) fad, I have made my way to the Go Teaching Ladder. It is a website and database based on a simple but great idea: People can get their matches reviewed by someone who is more skillful than themselves, while also reviewing the matches of those ranked lower than themselves. For instance, if you are a 10-kyu player, you could review the game of a 20-kyu gamer and have your own latest match reviewed by a 1-kyu player.  (Actually the difference from 10 to 1 is greater than from 20 to 10, I would say. Progress is easier at the bottom. Well, once you get started, I guess. I still can’t seem to get it.)

By using this system, only the ones at the bottom are only receiving, and only those at the very top are only giving. And even that is not exactly true. You see, not only is it a well known fact that teaching makes your own understanding more solid. In the case of Go, there is also the element that Go is not a single skill. Some players are strong in the mid-game, others in the endgame. Some play logically, calculating possible future moves; others are intuitive, reacting to the shapes and patterns formed by the stones on the board. Some play more aggressively, others more defensively. Some rely on remembering a vast library of standard responses, while others prefer to think for themselves with every move they make. Because of this and more, you can be better than a player at nine moves in a row, and then the tenth amazes you with its brilliance. So reviewing someone moderately below you can still give you a bunch of new ideas.

Best of all, the reviewed games are stored in an archive for anyone to download and watch. It uses the .SGF format, which can be used by a number of programs to play back the moves on a visual Go board on the screen, with comments on the side and pointers on the board and alternative play sequences shown. The standard program from Pandanet, GoPanda, can also load these files. (The same format is used when you want to look back over your old games that you have played on the IGS.) GoPanda is written in Java so it probably runs on several non-Windows computers as well.

I have downloaded a few games, mainly such where a low-level match was reviewed by a high-level player. I was hoping that some of the mistakes were similar to mine and some of the advice was relevant to me. Wouldn’t that be nice. So I read a couple reviews, got a number of great ideas, and fired up a new game on my Galaxy Tab, still on the easiest level. It crushed me just as easily as before. Not only am I unable to learn from my mistakes, it seems I am unable to learn from other people’s mistakes as well, even when they are thoroughly documented and an alternative approach is spelled out. I must have lost close to a dozen games by now!

A dozen games? What happened to the 20 000 games I was suppose to lose, getting butthurt every time? Well, that was to become a master player. I am just saying, it should be possible to see or feel some progress after spending hours each day for several days studying Go. Perhaps I have an anti-talent, perhaps I am immune to Go somehow. I saw this guy at the Internet Go Server just recently, who had won 2100 games and lost 2400. He was 17-kyu (the lowest that is recognized on IGS) and struggling against someone in the beginner class (everything below 17k, basically). So after playing over 4500 games, he was still clinging to the bottom like a sea star. That is kind of sad. I wonder if that was someone who started playing Go in his later years as well? Or someone with an anti-talent, like me?

But for everyone else, the Go Teaching Ladder seems like a great resource.