The Game of Go

OK, we're taking a break from the cold of Antarctica and the steep cliffs of the Gunks to report on the Game of Go. Turns out my nephew, Thomas--above--is a Go champion, which has our family both baffled and delighted. At the moment he is representing France in the 30th International Amateur Go Championships in Shizuoka. After Friday's games he is ranked 12th. The big news is that he beat a stronger player today: Ondrej Silt a 6d (that's 6 Dan) from the Czech Republic. Here is the commentary on the game:

Commentary by Michael Redmond 9p, transcribed by Chris Garlock.

Sixteen-year-old Thomas Debarre 5d comes up with a new variation on a  popular joseki played by top Japanese player Cho U in his 5th-round game against Ondrej Silt 6d of Czechia. “This is a completely new variation altogether,” says Michael Redmond 9P in his commentary on the game. “It’s very interesting.” But Debarre falls behind in the opening, playing “too many moves in the small area,” says Redmond.  Silt maintains his lead through move 89 when Debarre manages to generate a severe attack that threatens to either kill a large group or wipe out Silt’s side position. Silt rolls the dice, protects his  side and, seven moves later, his group is dead…

To learn more about Go, the world of Go and Thomas, read this overlong essay I wrote in 2004 when Thomas was ranked a 3 Kyu and Ondrej a 5d. At this early competition (for Thomas) Ondrej was the star of the event. To have Thomas now win against Ondrej seems somewhat miraculous.

The Game of Go

Susan Fox Rogers

The game of Go is simple: two players face each other across a flat wooden board unadorned except for the black lines of a 19 X 19 grid; one player takes black, the other white. Black begins and slowly the small dime-sized stones click onto the intersections, occupying the blank space. There are no dice, no cards, and there’s no element of chance, just a slow assessment of how your color can control the board. This is the goal: to conquer, though there’s no violence involved, only contemplation, and something I’d call grace. How one color comes to take the board involves encircling the enemy. This basic strategy, so seemingly straightforward, requires a kind of thinking that is more mathematical than chess, a mind that can see not moves but shapes forming, like sand moving in the desert.

Over four thousand years ago, someone in China placed a stone on a board and Go was born. One legend has it that King Yau brought Go down from the Heavens and taught his son Dan Ju to play. From China, Go migrated to Japan, where around 1600 the Tokugawa shoguns first sponsored professional Go players. Though Go is played around the world, Japan is the holy land of Go; there, with luck, talent, and hard work young players might become professionals. As in any rarified world, the chances of success are slim—only a few professionals emerge each year out of hundreds of hopefuls. And, once a professional, fame remains restricted to an odd, insular world.

In The Master of Go, by Nobel prize winning author Yasunari Kawabata, the aging master, approaching death, allows the narrator to question the meaning of Go.  “What was this something called Go?” he asks, and a novelist in the story responds: “’If one chooses to look upon Go as valueless,’ he said, ‘then absolutely valueless it is; and if one chooses to look upon it as a thing of value, then a thing of absolute value it is’” (107). In May, 2004 in Cologne, Germany, at the European Youth Go championships, for approximately 300 players aged 5 to 18, Go had absolute value; for three days it was all that mattered to young Slavs and Russians, Italians, Hungarians, boys, girls, me and my French nephew Thomas, age eleven.

I do not play Go. And it wasn’t until two summers ago when Thomas hauled out a Go board and invited me to play that I knew what the game was. Like many Americans I thought it a kid’s game, similar to Chinese checkers, or, Othello, the contemporary cousin. After the first few fun games, the complexity of the game hit me. I’d make a move and Thomas would pick up my piece, Allons, Susie, he’d correct, using the gruff gestures and voice of his coach. As he demonstrated my mistake, it was impossible to pad the truth: I was no good. I couldn’t remember past games and those bad moves, I couldn’t see far enough in advance to know that I was soon going to be swallowed whole by a eager blond haired boy and his white stones. Playing felt like falling into an endless hole: once one concept was grasped--how eyes worked or what ko meant--ten more followed from it. Just move quickly, Thomas encouraged, but on my part there was no intuitive sense of the game. Excellence demanded a rare combination of talents I did not possess—mathematical ability, visual acuteness, and a memory that lets nothing slip.

It turns out Thomas has this sort of mind. Last spring my sister, clearly surprised, called to let me know Thomas had won the French Youth Go Championship for children under twelve. The prize: a trip to Japan. For ten days Thomas played against professionals and the photos from that trip—during which, wary of the food, he ate only rice—shows a short boy with big teeth, smiling wide and standing with his chest pushed out next to serious looking Japanese men, arms folded in front. Now, when we pass Japanese restaurants Thomas lets out an exaggerated sob, remembering his time there: day after day of Go.

Thomas can, like most kids, play any game day after day, but the intensity of Thomas’s passion for this game intrigued me, made me listen when he spoke of the rankings (kyu and dan and dan pro), the quirky people he seemed to worship, and the obscure books that he read (my favorite title: Making Good Shape). Surrounding Go rested a vibrant, odd history; clearly this wasn’t just a game, but a world.

So I offered to fly him to the European competition (by some stroke of fate, my sister and her family were living in the States) and for three days I sat at Thomas’s side, staring as shapes took form, understanding certain moves and baffled by others, listening for Thomas’s confidence or hesitation in the way his stones clicked against the board. But my focus often left the board and its mysteries to wander around the room, studying the young players, legs twisted under the table but torsos erect with the poise of an adult. These players and the others at the tables near us became my obsession, their postures and haircuts, their expertise in this small world where they are the masters, where, with the click of a stone they assume the dignity and power of royalty.

The setting for this match did not speak of royalty. All 450 of us (most of the players were traveling with a parent) were lodged in the youth hostel in the Northern end of Cologne. I hadn’t set foot in a youth hostel since the early 80s and memories of large communal dormers, and damp over-crowded bathrooms remained painfully vivid. But here the modern Spartan rooms offered personal bathrooms, and most opened wide onto a field; in the distance flowed the Rhine. The setting, however, hardly mattered to these young players; most would not have noticed if they were living in luxury.

The night before the first competition, Thomas, jet-lagged but energized, played a few warm up games against Antoine. At eighteen, Antoine is now too old to compete in the youth championships, but he has followed his father, Albert, to this competition to help coach. A lanky teen with shoulder-length wavy black hair, Antoine won the under twelve European championships three years in a row and last year tied for first in under eighteen. He doesn’t have the wonky look I’d expect of a Go champion and his youthful confidence and good looks makes me think he’s too cool for this world. But there is no sense that this is kid’s play, that he’s above it all and his keen interest in Thomas--as older brother and mentor--is genuine.

Albert is Thomas’s coach. A brusque Frenchman with dark hair and a permanent five o’clock shadow I liked him immediately for his unapologetic passion for this game. A line of sweat coats his upper lip throughout the games; he cares, wants his players—five in all—to win, to play well, to represent him, Strasbourg, France. Go is his world: he’s written two books on how to teach children, and in Strasbourg, where Thomas lives, he’s developed a strong club. At this competition there are three players from the Strasbourg club in the under twelve category: Victor, a leggy boy a head taller than Thomas, his brown eyes shaded by a baseball cap, and Astrid, one of the rare girls, and a beauty with her long dark hair, her mother Asian her father French.

After the warm up game, Albert pronounced that a few months in the States had not dulled Thomas’s abilities. Then he promptly sent Thomas to bed with the warning to play no more, and never between games. In the stairwell, we encountered a slim, hunched, British boy who greeted us with exuberance. “I think I’ll do well,” he said. All awkward schoolboy, I wondered if dress and posture revealed a child’s skills: the nurdier the better. We all wore nametags with our nationalities and rankings printed. Rankings begin at 30 kyu and descend from there, then climb from one to nine dan. For this competition players assigned their own rankings and the highest was 5 dan held by two players: Ondrej Silt, a striking Czech boy and Ilia Shikshin, the pale faced son of the imposing Russian coach, Valerij Shikshin. My nametag revealed my non-playing status at 30 k.  Thomas was 3k. Except for a Ukrainian boy, who does not show, Thomas was the highest ranked player under twelve. He expected to win; I was embarrassed to realize that I expected him to win as well.

The first match began at nine in the morning on Friday, April 31. In the cafeteria beforehand an exuberant chaos made it difficult to focus on the sliced meat and cheese, granola, yogurt, and bread. Thomas spooned down a bowl of cereal while I tried to figure out where people were from, what languages were being spoken. Russian seemed to dominate. Across from me sat two young boys, round headed, plump, unsmiling. Neither looked alert enough to play a sharp game of Go. But their father, himself lively, seemed ready to play. How many children had been dragged to this event by their parent’s passion?

I did not have to worry that this was my event, or the result of pressure from my sister or brother-in-law. They are cautiously amused, and if anything, they try to tame Thomas’s drive. “Take a lot of books,” Becky had advised before I left, and I imagine that if she had been along she would have read a few, or revised an essay. But I could not. It wasn’t just that I wanted Thomas to do well and enjoy himself, there was something else. Being in the presence of anyone striving for excellence becomes intoxicating. Their focus and devotion, which borders on the religious, infects me. I love obsessives, and here was a building full to bursting with young devotees. That they were devoted to playing an ancient Japanese game made them all that more fascinating to me. Who were these kids who were giving their childhoods to Go?

Before the first round, Albert pulled his players together. Thomas, Astrid and Victor encircled Albert, all fidgeting. “You will win because you are the best,” Albert told them. And then he added: “I will give you a prize if you are all in the first five,” as if he were psyching them up for a race. In the background stood the parents: Victor’s father, Vincent, a Go player himself; Astrid’s mother and father who were there with their son, Alexis, competing in under 18; and me in American jeans and a white t-shirt. The other parents had all schlepped to competitions in the past to watch their children win or lose, and the drill was familiar, without much excitement except in their child’s victory. They sat chatting in the hallway while I sat glued to Thomas’s side through each game.  

Before leaving for Germany Becky asked if I was nervous. “About what?” “That Thomas will lose.” I knew Becky was not invested in her son’s success so she puzzled me. “You know he cries.” I did know this about him, that the tears came fast and short, the pent up fluid after tremendous focus and desire. It was this desolation my sister feared. “Either way, I think we’ll have a good time,” I reasoned.

But Becky’s worry infected me. Since I have rarely competed in anything, Thomas’s competitive nature, gleeful and catholic—he’ll compete at anything—intrigued me. I wanted to watch that competition turned high to see how it emerged. I would just observe, be witness to this foreign event. But there, on competition day, something kicked in. Perhaps pure adrenalin by association, or hormones in general—the place was soaked in adolescent growth—I wanted Thomas to win.

 As Thomas settled into his chair across from Alexander Eerbeek (9k) from the Netherlands, my only models for psyching up a player came, as Albert’s did, from sports: the boxer in the corner massaged by his coach who is whipping him into an aggressive frenzy. Here, calm seemed essential, so all I could do was place a green glass bottle of carbonated water next to him. This was my small gesture toward helping him win: water. Stay hydrated.  I had little else to offer.

While most of the players sat at wooden tables in two large rooms where the din of play made concentration impossible, we were sequestered in a small airless room reserved for the top four boards under eighteen and the top two boards for under twelve. Here were the elite; here the tension remained high; here was the future of European Go.

A slim woman dressed in black jeans and the trademark black t-shirt with the Cologne Cathedral dotted with Go stones took stance, making sure that no one spoke. Communication between those who watch and the players was strictly forbidden. But complete silence was impossible: the door opened and closed as coaches and fathers entered, took note of the games, left. There were several professionals attending this competition, these gatherings a part of their livelihood. Three had been paid to attend: Yang Yu-Chia, a Chinese woman, who was greeted at the opening ceremony with a large poster that read: We love Yuki; Catalin Taranu, a Romanian and one of few professional Go players in Europe who is not Asian; and Abe Yoshitera (9d), reverentially referred to as Abe Sensei, who looked just as a master Go player should: an aging Japanese man in a grey suit. They wandered through the room, leaning against the tables to analyze how the games proceeded. Even with their presence the young players did not allow their eyes to stray from the board. Thomas concentrated, took white stones between index and middle finger and placed them on the board with a confident click.

Yet, in the first few minutes of play, Thomas was not winning this game against young Alexander. Of course I had no idea, but I worried he was playing too fast, the click of the stone hitting the board followed quickly by the beep as he tapped his time clock. These games were being played according to the Ing rules and so each player had an hour. Overtime was allowed, but for every ten minutes, two points are lost. From time to time, Alexander forgot to push his clock, the sort of mistake a child would make. His time never ran out but a small smile lingered on Thomas’s lips as he enjoyed watching Alexander’s minutes slip by.

At a table to my left sat Timor, a tall blond Russian boy in a long-sleeved flannel shirt who was part of a fleet from Kazan. The year before he had tied with Antoine for the under-eighteen youth championship, and I found something appealing in his long, serious face and broad shoulders. Mid-game he unfolded himself from his seat and sauntered out of the room. I looked around to see if anyone else was concerned by his absence, and that his time would run out. But his opponent remained focused, staring hard at the board. At another table sat the only girl in the room, Rita Pocsai from Hungary, whose father is a famous player. She hunched over the table, her short hair bobby pinned back, exposing her round oil-slicked cheeks. A small purse draped over one shoulder and she sat legs crossed, as if by squeezing her thighs together she could bring about the perfect move.

From his expression it was impossible to tell if Thomas was winning, and then suddenly the game was over. Each player filled in those spaces he had captured, a noisy, quick affair that hardly held the seriousness of the previous moves. The blank spaces were added to the remaining stones to give the margin of victory. This simple method of counting—there are others, infinitely more complicated—again followed the Ing rules, the name of a successful Taiwanese businessman, Ing Chang Yi, who left his money for youth competitions. The Ing Foundation was one of the largest sponsors of this competition.

Until Thomas looked at me with a smile I remained uncertain who had won. 15 points. The boys shook hands, a limp gesture, and quietly left the room where the older players seemed to be just a few moves into their games. As I stepped into the hallway my legs went weak with relief. One down.

Antoine, wearing a t-shirt that read: Strasbourg, you’ll never walk alone, greeted Thomas in the hallway, and rather than let Thomas’s victory sweep him, he took him by the back of the neck. “It is not polite to let your opponent’s time run out like that,” he chastised. There are rules and then there is politeness. Albert shrugged and gave a half laugh, “It doesn’t matter how you win,” he said. “Just win.”

Immediately Thomas installed himself in front of a board, and with Albert he replayed his opening moves. Juan Guo (7d), a Chinese professional appeared at their table. After each move she swept the stones off the board, and asked questions. “Who is happier?” She replayed the moves quickly, placing stones, scooping them up, redoing the patterns with great assurance. “You have a little house,” she explained. Thomas placed a stone, offering an alternative. “Now you are strong so you are happy.”

 Many of the opening moves, known as Joseki, are standard, but the memory required for this move-by-move after-game replay stunned me. All of the best players were able to rework their games, understand what might be a better move, and remember that for the future. In contemporary movies such as A Beautiful Mind where the protagonist plays Go, his intelligence is genius, easily capable of such memory. But John Nash is also schizophrenic and an outcast. I imagined Rita Pocsai walking down the hall of her high school with a stack of books; then I pictured Timor asking a girl out on a date. They were just kids, normal kids in every way except that they had this special interest and talent, like the kid who made model airplanes after school. But part of me did not believe my fantasy of normalcy; I couldn’t really imagine Timor asking a girl out because he would never find a girl as interesting as a Go board. Go wasn’t just what these kids did in the evenings or on the weekends; Go was the center. It was an identity, but that identity was bigger than any child, deeper than any person.

On the plane to Cologne Thomas asked: “When you were my age, were you passionated by pi?” I so liked his English use of the French word passioner that I later told Becky this “your kid is pretty adorable” anecdote. “Did he tell you that he has the first two hundred numbers memorized?”  She asked. He hadn’t, and for this I was relieved; there’s no boasting. But this seizing on a subject followed by the desire to devour through memorization has always been acute. A few years ago I phoned Becky who explained, slightly dismayed, that Thomas was memorizing the top one hundred cyclist in the world. Curious to watch his memory in action a while later I set him a few tasks: memorize the presidents of the United States. After a day of relentless repetition he was rattling them off in thirty four seconds—memory is nothing without speed--then later, thirteen seconds.

There are no interests, only obsessions. Looking around the light-filled but messy hallway in the youth hostel, it seemed lucky that Thomas had found Go. It happened by accident: one weekend he tagged along when Vincent went to practice with Albert. The interest was immediate and consuming. Perhaps he realized that Go could not be devoured or used up, that the appeal would stretch on endlessly. For an obsessive, Go is the promised land. Here you could live forever, never bored, never content with the sense of mastery.

No one is truly a master of Go. Unlike chess where Big Blue and Deep Junior win against the best, a computer cannot play Go as well as a human. There is a mathematical element to Go, and many successful players are mathematicians. Conversely, Go players at Princeton helped in the development of combinatorial mathematics. A computer should not be stumped by these mathematics. But there is clearly something beyond the math, a je ne sais quoi, as the French say, of the human mind. For the Japanese this something else might be called art, or the spiritual. The thoughtful, often agonizing, gestures of the older players speak to something more profound but for the younger players, moving quickly in a mental race to defeat, that something else is only faintly glimpsed. What I glimpse, though, fascinates and frightens me.

During the two-hour lunch, Thomas was warned not to play. “Take an hour to relax in your room, do nothing,” Albert advised. Thomas reluctantly followed me to our room and there stretched out on his bed reading a Go-centered comic translated from Japanese into French, Hikaru no go (the Go of Hikaru). I graded student papers and peered out the window, where children played Frisbee Go, using the lids of garbage pans as the Frisbee stones.

Thomas’s second competitor, Joshua Chao (10k), a Taiwanese boy living in the Netherlands, complicated my direct competitive drive to win. Dressed in a bright blue t-shirt, he was smaller than Thomas, who is not a big boy. But I felt protective of this silent boy who, with his soft black hair that circled his smooth face and small red lips, looked like a duckling. He never cracked a smile, only looked up, somewhat bewildered, at his father, dressed in a light brown jacket, and blue button down shirt, the same color as his son’s. The father stood to the side and noted every move.

As the boys played, the afternoon heat became a bit oppressive, players and watchers sweating and fanning themselves. The large windows could not be opened wide as sounds of playing children distracted the players. Cracked open for the faintest breath of air, they allowed for smells to waft in: the zoo across the road, perhaps, or was it the sheep I saw grazing in a wide swatch of grass by the Rhine?  Lilacs and honeysuckle bloomed nearby, but even they could not sweeten the sweat-soaked air of mental combat.

    At the table to my side, Rita and Timor played each other. They could be brother and sister or boyfriend and girlfriend, but a wooden board separated them, the only language they had in common. Timor fanned himself, stretching his long legs underneath the table, looking idly about the room, without expression on his noble face. Rita remained in her fixed pose, head arched over the board; if she shifted her eyes, perhaps the board too would shift. The stones played out slowly, Timor rising to wander from the room, a feigned nonchalance in his long gait.

In the elite room the players did not remain consistent—bumped to a lower rank they were exiled to the larger room. But steady in this room was the Hungarian boy, Ondrej, with wavy black hair, who wore black jeans and a black woolen sweater for three days. Handsome and confident, he was the darling of the competition, fresh from several years of studying in Japan. His gestures and confidence—he too left the room but not, it seemed, out of nerves, but more because he wanted to take his time, or was bored. There’s a show off quality to the way he hiked up the sleeves of his sweater and settled his strong jaw into the crook of his fingers to contemplate the board. He knew that he would win this competition.

On this round, a new player had entered the room, a small boned boy with shaggy dirty blond hair and a prominent nose. He is all elbows and angles. Igor Nemliy hails from Russia, from Kazan, as does Timor and his brother Artem. In the room sat Ilia Shikshin as well. Four in all, these Russians occupied half of the elite tables under eighteen.

Vasily, the Russian coach, dressed in black jeans, and pointed black cowboy boots, his large belly protruding slightly over a wide belt, is not someone you want to mess with. He looks more a mobster than a Go coach, and I wondered what he did to make his players so good. He installed himself at a table outside the room with Oleg Gavrilov, the vice-president of the European Go Federation. A slim man in a grey suit, he has high cheekbones, an elegant style. At lunch, the Russian compatriots pulled out bottles of beer. When I passed them, I smiled and Vasily smiled back, a broad, hearty smile, gold teeth gleaming. At one point I approached Vasily to ask him: what do you do to make your players so good? He nodded and smiled, the mumble from the back of his throat hardly an answer. You aren’t going to tell me, are you, I teased. He smiled some more. You don’t understand me, is that it? I asked, and he continued to smile.

Vasily’s boys did not smile. They remained straight-faced, as they slowly took over the room. The comparison of what was happening in the room to what was happening on the Go board seemed obvious, one country attempting to control the board, the room, the competition itself. The Romanians were the largest presence but they were not in evidence in the elite room. The French were strong, and Thomas could recite what years not only France but also the Strasbourg club had done well. The truth was, France hadn’t won a European championship under 18 in twenty years until the year before when Antoine tied—with two Russians. Thomas felt this allegiance to Strasbourg strongly; his victories mattered but so too did those of his teammates, Victor and Astrid.

The game between Thomas and Joshua played out quickly, Joshua hesitating from time to time, his smooth brow creased into a slim furrow. These young players appeared hyper, the ding of their time clocks a near-regular beat next to the older players whose movements were so slow they used up their hour and often moved into overtime. In Kawabata’s novel, the players are not limited to an hour each but to eighty hours, played out in a total of sixteen sessions; the match lasted three months. In the novel, the amount of time given to a single move—up to three hours—borders on the absurd. There in Cologne an hour seemed to stretch the limits of concentration, nerves visibly frayed as the final moves were made.

Thomas won by eighteen points. Not sure of Go etiquette, I shook hands with the father, more obviously disappointed than his son. Thomas shot into the hallway and ran toward Albert and Antoine, waiting with a board to replay the game. Astrid’s parents stood nearby. Did she win? I asked. “Of course,” her mother said. “Otherwise she’d be beaten at home.”

Day one was complete and Thomas was free to do as he wanted and so he watched animated cartoon videos based on the Go cartoon he’d been reading earlier. And, he played a few more games. The desire to play never ends.

Like most Go players, Thomas likes pretty much any game—there is hardly a game Thomas hasn’t played or doesn’t own and he’ll enter a toy store just for the sheer pleasure of being surrounded by games. If there are demonstration puzzles he’ll put them together or take them apart. On the plane from Newark to Amsterdam we played Boggle, a word game and so I assumed I should be the victor, especially since we were searching for English words. But I lost, again and again. Dumbstruck, I tried to understand why. There was something in his drive—I really did not care that much if I won or lost. But also he understood the rules of this game: move fast, make mistakes because some of the invented words will be real and you’ll get points. Move fast because there’s a time limit and only in movement will there possibly be success; contemplation is a curse. Thomas gets inside each game he plays and understands the fundamental “what it takes” to win. And then he launches himself toward victory. I was looking for words, not playing the game.

While Thomas played, I strolled by the Rhine, then walked with Shavit Fragman, a stocky, balding man with lively eyes, and, I learn later, the father of the two round-faced boys from breakfast. He’s Israeli, wrote his MBA thesis using Go as a model. He has started a Go club for children in Rosh HaAyin, has a website listing activities and photos of Go events, and hopes to spread the game in Israel. In perfect English, he told me that Go offers lessons for children. I nodded in agreement. Most of my students, eighteen or older, don’t have the focus that these kids have. “Yes, it helps their memory, and to focus, but above all it teaches them economy.”  Fragman is not the first to use an economic metaphor for Go. This model originally developed in Japan at the beginning of the 20th century when some smart businessman put forth that Go offered lessons for the business world: Invest stones in one area, and avoid wasting them where the opponent is strong; try to win, but let the opponent win something as well: keep competition alive, as an all-out fight could destroy both parties. But how children might make use of this seems far-fetched. “Think of each stone as a shekel,” he explained. “If you invest it here, you get two candies, and here, three candies. Where would you put it?” I nodded, still not fully understanding. Later I asked Thomas if this made sense to him. “Not really,” he said, without much reflection.

Comparisons--to economy, to war, to art--abound because describing Go is so difficult. The most common image evoked is of combat, the game a mental martial art, or a model for war. In Shan Shu’s novel, The Girl Who Played Go, a disguised Japanese soldier in 1930s China plays a young Chinese girl in the village square. Their game becomes the focus, the still center in a storm of the war that surrounds them. If you placed a stone in the situation the soldier is in—surrounded by the enemy—it is called a suicide. When Thomas demonstrates a suicide on the board, and later speaks of “suiciding” himself I wince, shoring up the fragile line between game and life.

I retreated to my room for a rest and on my way up the stairwell, I ran into the lively, confident British boy of the day before. “How have you done?” Dreadful, he said without hesitation. His cheerfulness delighted me. For some, then, Go was just a game. At one point in Kawabata’s novel the narrator is playing an American. “He was cheerfully indestructible, not in the least upset however many times he lost, and seemed likely to have the better of me because of this very indifference. In the face of such honest fecklessness, I thought myself rather perverse and cruel….It was quite clear that playing Go with a foreigner was very different from playing Go with a Japanese. I wondered whether the point might be that foreigners were not meant for Go.” (116-117). The cost of losing to a foreigner is just that: a lost game.

Go only arrived in the United States before the Second World War, but it took until 1970 for an American to attain 1 dan status. In 1987 the first American, Janice Kim, became a professional.  In 2001 Michael Redmond, who studied in Japan, reached the highest possible rank of 9 dan pro. These players are few, but clearly some foreigners are meant for Go. And for some, losing was not just losing a game but losing everything.

For dinner, I joined Horst Timm (1K) and his wife, Dorothea (8K), who had organized this event from their home in Castrop-Rauxel, deep in depressed German coal mining country. Dorothea grew up there, has moved twice, each house one hundred yards from the other, and her family all lives in town. Sundays are devoted to mother’s cooking, the family all gathering. Despite this small town background, Dorothea was wearing hip glasses, and they have six computers at home, all constantly online.

In 1979 Horst and Dorothea played Go together, and in 1980 they married. He teaches high school math and arts, while she teaches home economics and English. Go is what they do together, though neither competes. Their children also play, but without any drive. I would have expected the organizers of this event to be fanatics, but instead there’s a terrific sense of pleasure in the organizing, in doing it well (which they have) and in seeing these children challenge themselves. Go as a leisure pastime, like playing tennis or taking a walk was foreign to the world I had been living in for the past twenty-four hours. But why not? It is a game, after all. The British boy knew this.

Dinner at a nearby Brauhaus arrived painfully slowly—the speed of the youth hostel cafeteria had definite virtues—and as we drank glass after glass of the local Kolsch, they told me stories. The Ukrainians had not arrived because they had been unable to obtain visas for travel. Since parents travel with their children to these competitions, the authorities were more cautious than usual. At the visa office in Kiev three young girls were taken into a room and questioned on the history of Go. They could not answer (as most kids probably could not). The authorities decided they were not attending a Go competition. Visas denied. Just a game.

The Romanians arrived Thursday night, when they had paid only for Friday and Saturday night at the hostel (the rates were reduced for the competition—50 euros for a child and 80 for an accompanying adult for three nights, breakfast and lunch included). Unable to afford an extra night they paid for their bus driver to have a room and four people slid in. The rest slept in the bus, a beige blocky affair with a roof rack, straight out of the sixties. Just a game.

The devotion Go demands is not for the feeble.

Day two, Thomas was playing his arch-rival, Astrid (6k). For the past two years beating her had been his goal. Now, he was stronger, but only by a fraction. Still, Thomas was upset, wanting to exert his skill with someone he did not know, did not care for.

Astrid was wearing a green sweater, and she sat poised at the table, her black hair neatly combed. She has thick lips, and her cheeks are the smooth, clear skin of a pre-adolescent, while her forehead is dotted with small pimples. She fanned herself in the heat, an elegant gesture, and next to her stood two bottles of Coca-Cola. Thomas looked sleepy, his coarse hair a bit of a mess, his long eyelashes fluttering over tired eyes. He was wearing a t-shirt made by his French grandmother on which she had stitched a mini Go board onto the left pocket area. Black and white buttons dangled representing Go stones. He will refuse to wear such a shirt in a few years, but for now it pleases him, anything related to Go pleases him.

At the other under-twelve table, were two new players to the elite room: a young Russian, Rafael Samakaev playing Amir, Shavit Fragman’s son. Rafael is also from Kazan, is cousins to Timor and Artem. Throughout the game, when Timor rose to stretch his long legs he did not leave the room, but rather came over, arms folded, to watch his cousin play. Rafael has the family blond hair, and a look that is inscrutable for a child—placid with the absence of any emotion. Amir’s father stood at his side, videotaping the game. From time to time Rafael’s father (2d) appeared as well. A lanky man with the same dirty blond hair as his son, he has a prominent nose, was dressed in Boss jeans and a denim button down shirt.

When Thomas beat Astrid I was embarrassed to face her parents. We had been celebrating our victories as a team. “That’s the way it is,” her mother shrugged. “Someone has to win.”

Between games, Albert slipped me an envelope with 170 euros, money from the European Go federation to help pay for Thomas’s trip. Grateful, I approached Oleg Gavrilov and shook his hand. “We like to support promising young Go players,” he said with great formality. “May he be successful.” I nodded. “Except against the Russians,” I joked, then regretted my gesture. “Yes,” he said, admitting a small smile. “I hope to see you in Canada.” This was now the refrain: see you in Canada, in Vancouver, where the world championships would be held.

 Round four in the afternoon of the second day Thomas sat across from the young Russian, Rafael (6k). Thomas looked even more tired than in the morning, and Rafael, his large ears protruding, looked goofily dazed. He was wearing a purple and green hoodie, and between moves he chewed his fingernails or with both hands picked up a bottle of diet coke and took a swig. There were sighs as well, and looks of puzzlement.   

Thomas seemed less reflective, moving quickly, the stones smacking the board, the time clock beeping with unnerving regularity.

Next to us sat Victor playing Amir, and in the far corner at the highest table, sat just one player, Ilia Shikshin. Ondrej has not arrived and Ilia, after waiting a decent time, started the clock. Fifteen minutes late, Ondrej sauntered in, hiked up his sleeves, sat, made two moves, and left again. Was this some psychological game? Some prima donna display?

Rafael played his game flanked by his compatriots, his coach in his pointed boots, his father, hunched at his side, his cousin Timor lurking in the background between his own moves. I sat next to and slightly behind Thomas, glancing over my shoulder as Victor and Amir reached the end of their game. Victor looked up at his father. “I’ve won, haven’t I Papa?” he asked, pure child. His father shrugged as the boys filled in the empty spaces. The match was a close one, Victor losing by few points. I watched him leave the room, all dejection. Thomas looked over as he left, could see by Victor’s gait that he had lost, could see his disappointment.

I sensed Thomas was off, that his concentration was weakened from fatigue and travel and distractions. The game was close, and as the points were counted, I sensed him verging on tears, but the phalanx of Russians staring down at him became a wall to his tears. I shook hands with Rafael’s father but could not say, “someone must win.” Then I shuttled Thomas into the hallway. Suddenly, I was afraid I might cry, so I hugged him, and said he had played well, it was only one loss. For once Thomas did not want to replay his game, know where he went wrong. He retreated to our room to read Hikaru no go.

The final day of competition brought Thomas against Amir (4k), and his victory was assured, though Thomas was already aware he would not place first. “Today, to my deception, I kind of knew I was not going to be first,” he wrote in his journal. But the rankings are complex and where Thomas stood was unclear: only the top two players would be sent to the World Championships. When Thomas beat Amir, I apologized to Shavit, whom I had become fond of, his good humor relentless. “That’s the way it is,” he said to my apology. “Someone must win.”  

By the final round, the room was stale, acidic with the smell of children who had not been told to bathe. Thomas’s final rival, Lisy Pavol (8k) from Slovakia was ragged, his t-shirt smudged, fingers sticky, hair matted in the back from the crush of a pillow. He was not unlike most of the little boys. I wondered if this was because most of them were accompanied by their fathers, who perhaps were not used to insisting on washed hair or evening baths. The oily sheen of adolescence never vanished from the foreheads of the older players whose struggles with hormones and pimples had been, for three days, subsumed by the game.

It was only Astrid, her long black hair falling to her shoulders, who looked like she had combed her hair in the past three days. She sat poised against Rafael. Though anyone can play Go, there are definitely more boys than girls and there was a hesitation in Astrid’s eyes that made me protective: girls are not raised for such competition. I was not raised for competition, knowing that when you compete someone has to win.

Lisy Pavol marked every move he made on a sheet of paper and moved slowly; a small smiled lingered on his face. His odd confidence unnerved me, and not wanting to infect Thomas I left the room, my nerves snapping. In the hallway there was much talk about the rankings. If Astrid beat Rafael that would possibly place Thomas first, though perhaps tied with Astrid. Two players from the same country cannot attend the world championships so it would be a draw. If Astrid lost to Rafael, Thomas was assured second and a trip to the Worlds. What did he prefer?

Once Thomas beat Lisy, he stood glued to Astrid’s table, silently rooting her on, knowing that her victory might knock him out of the World championship. Astrid was losing, then rallied, then slipped, her game under pressure and so uneven. Astrid’s parents sat in the hallway, banned by Astrid from watching her game. “She can stick it out,” her mother told me. “She’s like her mother, gentil-joli (nice and pretty), but underneath she’s tough.” This was clearly true, the match extending to the limit, Astrid losing by a thin margin.

And so Thomas was second and heading to Canada. The Russian vice-president approached and placed congratulatory kisses on both of my cheeks.

The awards ceremony was a muddle of exhaustion and elation—presents and prizes for all—and Thomas received one of the oversized black t-shirts with the Cologne cathedral dotted with Go stones, a piece of paper announcing his award, and a trip to Vancouver. Rafael placed first, while Amir placed third and Astrid fourth. In the under eighteen category the Russians swept the competition. After the star Czech Ondrej came four boys from Kazan: Ilia, Igor, Timor, and Artem. Only one, Ilia, could travel to the World Championship so the sixth place player, the Frenchman Thomas Hubert (3d) would be flying to Vancouver.

Thomas sat on my lap—still a little boy—and smiled through the event. Later on the phone from Cologne to Ann Arbor he told his mother, “I was overjoyed by the result.”  No boasting.

The youth hostel cleared out quickly, everyone clambering into cars to trek home, or rushing to the airport. That left Thomas and me, dazed in the silent hallways. We decided to celebrate with dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant. As we walked the empty sidewalk, he took my hand, “Thank you for sitting by me during all of my competitions,” he said. I wasn’t sure he was even aware I was there. “It was great to watch you play.” “Really?” he asked. Yes. What did I see as he played out those stones? The confidence of a young boy, the focus, the pleasure of playing a game. A game that was not a game at all.

Over pizza for Thomas and rigatoni with fresh asparagus for me we dissected each player, where they were from, what happened to them. I told Thomas what I had heard of Ondrej, that his Japanese sponsor had left Japan to live in Italy. His return to Europe was premature, his goal of becoming professional stunted. “It must be awful,” I said. “Why?” Thomas asked. “He has nothing. He’s missed all of high school and now here he is with just Go.” Thomas still couldn’t see how that might be awful.

Together, we worried a bit about Victor who won so few games, and left the competition early so that Thomas was unable to say goodbye (Later in the spring he would win the French youth championship). Together we wondered how Joshua Choa fared (he placed 6). “He was a sweet boy,” I said. “Yeh, he was nice,” Thomas agreed, though I realized they never spoke. Wanting to beat his competitors doesn’t exclude liking them. This was a refined sort of competition: without arrogance, without animosity or anger. And this is one way that Go becomes more than a game, in the grace with which the children won or lost, the limp handshake a larger gesture than formality, a shake like a bow toward something bigger that these children can not yet articulate.

What does it mean to be the second best European youth player under twelve? Nothing, and everything. Thomas would return to Ann Arbor where none of his classmates knew where he had been for the past few days—sick at home, perhaps. None of them would care that he was second in Europe and that he had a too-large t-shirt and a piece of paper proclaiming his victory. No one would see that he was royalty.

We ate and debriefed some more and on the twenty-minute walk home, we had to walk over the subway line on a pedestrian bridge. I took for the ramp and without warning launched into a run, knowing Thomas would follow, would, despite a full stomach, hurl himself upward to beat me. He could not let pass the opportunity to compete, and win.