Baduk House 2nd Session
This post was skillfully written by resident member Ursa Woodring.
It was the 21st of May and I was looking at socks–or rather–looking at my sister and mother looking at socks. Mostly, I just wandered around REI, wondering about what was going to happen next: driving to the Baduk House. After my family finally made their purchases, my mother, father, sister, sister’s friend, and I got back into the van and off we drove.
Upon arriving, I'm greeted by Devin, and taken on a tour of the house. Upstairs there are two bedrooms shared by the residents. And there are two offices, one equipped with a set up to stream live games. The two residents already here—Jae and Eric—are quietly working on their computers. Downstairs one room contains a floor table with gobans set out and ready to play on. More gobans lie in a corner, and two floor gobans are stacked on top of each other so they can be reached from a regular-height chair. On a wall is a cork board filled with sticky notes outlining project tasks that are being worked on. In the kitchen, the fridge also has sticky notes on it: each one assigned to a different person to track chores.
“What color do you like?” Devin asks me. I say yellow. I’m given a set of yellow dishes that I will use during my time here. After that, I say goodbye to my family and begin playing the game.
I learned to play go over the quarantine summer of 2020. My sister begged me to learn after she had been playing for a couple months. At first, I was intimidated by the seemingly endless possibilities that the game presents, but once I started learning, I found it fun enough to keep going. Now I’ve been playing for two years and decided to immerse myself more into it by going to the Baduk House.
Hopefully here I will be able to steal all the go secrets from the other residents (So far, I’ve observed the goodness of clamps(for non-go players: a clamp is like a stone sandwich—delicious!)); and learn some strategies for starting my own go club when I go back to Asheville, North Carolina.
In my first week at the house, many things happened. Two more residents came: Javier and Ragnarr, from Spain and Texas respectively. I also met many go players at the local go clubs. In the large go book library at the house, I noticed the full collection of Hikaru no go. Since I was in the middle of reading the series, I excitedly continued reading the next volumes in it. I also began writing my own comic about trying to explain the Baduk House to the dentist.
For memorial day, we took a trip to the Green Lawn Abbey nearby, where we perused the stained glass windows and ate ice cream. There was a scavenger hunt to find particular pieces of the stained glass windows, and upon completion, we won some tickets to the outdoor movie night events that the abbey hosts. Then we went to the Green Lawn Cemetery where they were giving out free hotdogs. There, we searched for the oldest gravestone.
Since we all wanted to do more tsumego problems (a type of go puzzle), in the second week, we decided to have an hour a day where we all do our tsumegos. This was a big hit, and is now something that everyone looks forward to.
In the manga I was reading, Hikaru is challenged to play a no komi game (Komi gives extra points to white, so in a no komi game, white is at a disadvantage because black goes first) and try to make the game perfectly even—a tie. This is a very tricky thing to do because you have to consistently count points and adjust your play when your opponent does something unexpected.
I asked Devin if he’d ever tried to do this. He said that this is his strategy with new players. The next time I was at go club, I decided to attempt it. My opponent was a 13 kyu (not a new player), and we were playing with komi, but I still tried to make it as close as possible. I found that this approach to playing a weaker player made the game much more fun. My opponent got the satisfaction of playing a close game, while I tried to find moves that wouldn’t be too slack or too aggressive. I ended up winning by a point and a half. This was one of the interesting things I’ve learned so far.
Hopefully one day I will end a game in a perfect tie.