All Things Go Podcast

[00:00] Travis: This episode is sponsored by Baduk Pop and SmartGo One.

[00:27] Travis: The guests for this episode are special in a couple ways. One, because I have a personal connection to one of them and have been able to see some things kind of behind the scenes, but just from a distance over time.

Episode Introduction

[00:40] Travis: So that’s really cool.

[00:42] Travis: The other reason it’s special is because there’s a big event coming up for these two co founders of a new website called PlayGo.gg that’s been around for a little while and I think you’ll really enjoy this.

[00:57] Travis: Just a really great chance to get to know the two founders of the site, learn about some really exciting events that are coming up. I was able to get this edited in time for that event and so I think it’ll be timely.

[01:10] Travis: So take a listen.

How Nathan and Matthew Discovered Go

[01:15] Travis: Nathan and Matthew, it’s really great to

[01:17] Matthew Harwit: have you guys here.

[01:18] Nathan Harwit: Yep.

[01:18] Travis: Yeah.

[01:19] Matthew Harwit: Thank you for having us. Yeah.

[01:20] Travis: First of all, I do want to say I’m really excited for what.

[01:24] Travis: What you two, as co founders of PlayGo.gg are doing. And I know, I believe there’s another founder as well. But I think a lot of us are really excited for what’s been happening.

[01:35] Travis: And so I’ve been really looking forward to the conversation and the opportunity to speak. And so let’s kind of just dive into. Before we get to the site and the server,

[01:45] Travis: let’s go back to YouTube personally, because full disclosure. And Nathan, you have been my Go teacher, really since. Since I started.

[01:54] Travis: And so that’s a piece that I’ve actually always been interested in learning about you two.

[01:59] Travis: How were you first introduced to the game of Go?

[02:03] Nathan Harwit: We started right when we moved to Colorado. It was a chess tournament at our elementary school.

[02:09] Nathan Harwit: I think we were around seven or eight at the time.

[02:13] Nathan Harwit: There’s like a lunch break or some break in the middle.

[02:16] Nathan Harwit: And then we saw this kid playing by himself. He’s playing Go.

[02:21] Nathan Harwit: We’re like, oh, that’s a cool game. Like, how does that work? And he explained it and then said he learned from the Boulder Public Library.

[02:28] Nathan Harwit: So that’s where Matthew and I have been volunteering and teaching for many years. It’s a kids club, but there’s a lot of adults too. So that’s how we got into Go.

[02:38] Nathan Harwit: And. Yeah. Is that a chess tournament,

[02:40] Nathan Harwit: Matthew, would

[02:41] Travis: you like to add any color to that?

[02:43] Matthew Harwit: Yeah, like the kid’s mom is like, still really good friends with our mom and he’s like, oh, wow. It’s been like 20 plus years. And they’re like best friends. So I don’t think they knew each other before that.

[02:53] Matthew Harwit: And so, you know, funny. We learned Go and, you know, got really involved in. My mom got a nice kind of lifelong friend outfit. So it was. It was a very nice, good moment for, I think, everybody.

[03:03] Travis: Yeah, I know you two have formed many strong relationships through the Go community over time, and we’ll touch on that more as actually on the other podcast on Star Point with Justin, he just did that interview with a kid from Japan and they said, oh, by the way, I learned from somebody that’s doing this site,

[03:20] Travis: PlayGo.gg, gg.

[03:21] Travis: And didn’t I ask you, Nathan, the other night? And it wasn’t you two directly, it was one of your students that taught him.

[03:31] Matthew Harwit: Exactly. So. So.

[03:31] Travis: But.

[03:32] Matthew Harwit: But very close. I mean, it’s all definitely connected. Like the.

[03:35] Matthew Harwit: We have somebody called Hiru who’s been very helpful and getting us, like, started in marketing everything, especially in Japan.

[03:42] Matthew Harwit: I think he’s amazing specifically at connecting everybody in go, you know, including us. And so he was the one that taught that kid how to play.

[03:51] Matthew Harwit: He told me about it. I remember he sent me some images. I could probably find them.

[03:54] Matthew Harwit: I was like, oh, it must be that. So I asked him and it was, yeah.

[03:57] Travis: So that’s great.

[03:59] Travis: Okay, perfect.

[04:01] Travis: So let’s get into again, your journeys, because there are some really interesting factors here. So the first one is that you two are brothers. The second is that you two are twins.

[04:14] Travis: That’s pretty unique. And then the third thing is that you two are at least 6 dan Amateur.

[04:20] Travis: And the other thing is that I’ve learned from Nathan is that, Matthew, I think you give one stone handicap to Nathan depending on the day.

[04:28] Travis: So did it feel like you two, as you started from that tournament, that chess tournament,

[04:33] Travis: to wherever you kind of gotten to today,

[04:37] Travis: did you always feel like you two were progressing side by side or did your journeys kind of unfold differently?

Twin Rivalry, Growth, and Playing Styles

[04:43] Nathan Harwit: We started side by side as pretty close. And then I think at some point Matthew was quite a bit stronger.

[04:52] Nathan Harwit: And I remember there’s one specific event at Go Club where there’s like this old guy who was about 2 or 3 kyu.

[04:59] Nathan Harwit: And I think the week before we were both rated like 20 kyu or something. And then Matthew beat the guy with nine stones and then immediately jumped up. And so I was still significantly behind in terms of the club ranking.

[05:11] Nathan Harwit: I must have caught up. We were around 5 kyu.

[05:13] Nathan Harwit: I think I was stuck at 5 kyu for a bit longer. He was a bit stronger.

[05:17] Nathan Harwit: And then at some point we were like one to 3 dan Range and about the same. And then once AI came out, Matthew trained a bunch more and so I’d say he’s actually closer, about two stones stronger.

[05:28] Nathan Harwit: I’m like six to 7 dan range. Matthew is like somewhere around like weak ish pro depending on which region.

[05:35] Nathan Harwit: So like 8 to 9 dan or stronger.

[05:38] Nathan Harwit: So yeah, he’s definitely stronger now I would say.

[05:42] Matthew Harwit: I, I, I think Nate’s being a little too humble.

[05:44] Matthew Harwit: I think growing up like we were definitely around the same rank but I think he was actually better for at least in my opinion for actually quite a bit of time.

[05:51] Matthew Harwit: I remember one time we went to China and there was like a pro that was teaching us because it was part of like a trip that we had there which was a great experience.

[05:59] Matthew Harwit: But we both took four stones against the pro and Nathan, I think he won and I lost.

[06:05] Matthew Harwit: Then my mom told me afterwards that the pro thought Nathan was way more talented than me and I was like, oh, I was pretty upset about that. I don’t know, we were like at like 12 or 13 or something.

[06:16] Matthew Harwit: So I mean I feel like from my opinion, like raw talent wise, I actually think Nathan’s probably more talented than me but I just like put more time into it and he didn’t when we were both pretty strong already.

[06:27] Matthew Harwit: So I, I don’t really,

[06:29] Matthew Harwit: Yeah, I, I guess that’s my take on it but I guess everybody has their own take on things.

[06:34] Travis: Do you two feel like you feed off each other? How do you feel like you build off of each other when it comes to either projects and things you’re doing in the Go community or even if it’s in your just your play, playing serious games.

[06:49] Nathan Harwit: So basically Matthew and I are very, very competitive. So that kind of helps in the sense that we don’t like losing to each other, especially when we were younger. Yeah, a lot of fights and stuff but generally we don’t play each other too much now.

[07:04] Nathan Harwit: But in general because we don’t like to fall behind the other, that kind of helps push each other to kind of get better and that’s mostly in go. And then right now the project we’re working on a little bit more split focused.

[07:19] Nathan Harwit: But yeah, we kind of support each other and try to make the best Go website.

[07:23] Matthew Harwit: So I think anybody with a sibling would probably know it doesn’t have to be for go. But like let’s say like we play a game and like one side wins and like if they like so much as smirk a little bit,

[07:35] Matthew Harwit: why did you smirk?

[07:36] Matthew Harwit: And then like, and then we Just fight. Yeah. So I think looking back, it was good. Like, anybody that’s competitive, that has a sibling probably feels the same way. And so I think for us, Go was a big part of growing up, as were a bunch of other things.

[07:49] Matthew Harwit: But I mean, I think anybody that plays Go would probably agree that it teaches you a lot of things that help outside of go.

[07:55] Matthew Harwit: So I think we’re both very fortunate to have learned Go. And also I think it obviously helps a lot with this project that we’re building, because I think there’s just certain things that you can’t really know what to do and how to do it unless you’ve played Go for a long period of time.

[08:10] Matthew Harwit: And so I think that does help us hopefully build the best Go website in the world.

[08:15] Travis: I’m about to jump over into the website before I do that. Your playing styles, how are they similar? How are they different?

[08:23] Nathan Harwit: I would say I have a preferred style, but I generally,

[08:27] Nathan Harwit: because I’m not competing and I’m just playing, like, casually, I try to play the style that I’m not comfortable with to try to improve.

[08:35] Nathan Harwit: So currently my preferred style is more.

[08:40] Nathan Harwit: Less fighting and just try to like, out, calculate them and play endgame. I would win more games that way if I played that way. But there’s some strong amateurs at our local Go club, the same kids and teens Go club I was talking about earlier in Boulder,

[08:55] Nathan Harwit: and they’re really, really good at fighting. And so I figured, well, it’s the best chance to learn how to fight better if I play the guy that’s really good at fighting and I try to fight them.

[09:04] Nathan Harwit: And so generally I do much better when it’s less aggressive game and it’s more calculated.

[09:10] Nathan Harwit: But I’ve kind of been experimenting with more aggression and I actually think the game’s much more interesting with more fights.

[09:17] Matthew Harwit: Yeah, on my end,

[09:19] Matthew Harwit: I don’t know. My personal take after AI came out is that there’s kind of like two ways of playing Go.

[09:25] Matthew Harwit: There’s like a very calculation focused way of playing.

[09:29] Matthew Harwit: So the people that are really good at life and death and reading play that way. And then the other way is like very judgment focused. So you like, you figure out like, oh, how do I like, positionally play this?

[09:40] Matthew Harwit: And my personal take is like, everybody that learned with AI has gotten a lot better at that positional judgment type of gameplay.

[09:49] Matthew Harwit: But I think the one weakness that a lot of the people have now is that their life and death is not caught up to their positional judgment abilities.

[09:56] Matthew Harwit: And that applies like at our level, at lower levels, at even the highest levels. Like for example, Shin Jin-seo,

[10:02] Matthew Harwit: best player in the world by far. His only weakness is that he sometimes won’t be able to fight as well as other people.

[10:09] Matthew Harwit: The way you beat him is you pull him into like a super complicated game and then you just hope that you end up on top of.

[10:15] Matthew Harwit: But if you play like a positional game with him, you’ll almost always lose. You could probably dig around and find more information about it, but I think that reflects a lot of the benefits of AI and then some of the places where maybe people still need to improve.

[10:26] Matthew Harwit: So I would say I’m kind of in the same boat. So positionally I feel like I’m very strong.

[10:30] Matthew Harwit: I could basically make very, very few mistakes in any position you give me. If it’s just like a purely positional, like, oh, should you reduce, should you invade, should you tenuki.

[10:39] Matthew Harwit: Right. The general idea, I’m almost always good, but then if it comes to like a very complicated fight, then my level hasn’t caught up to that. So that’s where I would have trouble.

[10:48] Matthew Harwit: So I think for me then if I’m choosing a play style to play, it would be putting myself in a position where I don’t need to have any complicated fights.

[10:56] Travis: I should have asked each of you to describe the other person’s style of play. That might have been. That might have been fun. But I already missed the boat on that.

[11:05] Travis: This episode is sponsored by Baduk Pop, the app that makes learning Go fun and accessible.

[11:10] Travis: With interactive puzzles, bite sized lessons, and an AI tutor to guide you step by step. It’s perfect for players on the move. You can download it or learn more at BadukPop.com that’s B A D U K P O P dot com.

[11:26] Travis: This episode is also sponsored by SmartGo One. The all in One Go Toolkit for Apple devices.

[11:32] Travis: Replay professional games, solve problems and keep your SGF collection organized all in one elegant app.

[11:38] Travis: Check it out at SmartGo.com or wherever you go to get your apps.

[11:43] Travis: Let’s go into the website, which is now PlayGo.gg gg.

[11:49] Travis: How did the idea originally take form?

Sponsors

The Origins and Purpose of PlayGo.gg

[11:52] Nathan Harwit: So we were actually doing a different startup together,

[11:57] Nathan Harwit: a slightly bigger team.

[11:59] Nathan Harwit: We weren’t as well versed in it. Like we didn’t really understand the market that well and it wasn’t something we were really building for ourselves.

[12:08] Nathan Harwit: And so at that point for that company, we were kind of just not too motivated. So we kind of wind it down.

[12:14] Nathan Harwit: And then I brought up to Matthew like, hey, we should try to start a company for something that we actually know a lot about.

[12:22] Nathan Harwit: And then Matthew maybe is a few weeks later, a few months later, was like, oh, we shouldn’t do a Go website.

[12:29] Nathan Harwit: And he had. I think you had looked at some podcasts for Chess.com or whatever and got some inspiration,

[12:35] Nathan Harwit: and so that’s kind of how the idea started.

[12:37] Matthew Harwit: Yeah, I mean, I think in hindsight, it looks kind of obvious,

[12:40] Matthew Harwit: like, oh, we’ve been playing Go our whole lives. We teach, we’re very involved. Why not do something like this? But, yeah, I guess Hindsight’s always 20 20, but I think at the moment, for me, it was just.

[12:52] Matthew Harwit: I don’t know, maybe I’ll get some people mad when I say this, but I think Go is a better game than Chess, hands down.

[12:57] Matthew Harwit: And I’m like, well, chess has so many, like, cool things going for it, right? Like the Queen’s Gambit, the show. Right. Various documentaries, cheating scandals, and all these things. And it’s.

[13:07] Matthew Harwit: It’s mainstream. They have streamers playing it, and it’s like, well, I don’t see really a reason why we can’t do this for Go. And I. I know the haters will say, oh, you know,

[13:15] Matthew Harwit: there’s various reasons why you can’t do it. But my personal thought at that point was we should try it and see how it goes.

[13:21] Nathan Harwit: And.

[13:21] Matthew Harwit: And I think, of course, at that time, like, we didn’t have nearly as much insight as we do now.

[13:26] Matthew Harwit: Um, and I’m sure if I look back, like, a year from now, I’ll say the same thing again. But I think the idea stemmed from these things. And I still think, looking back, I still believe in that idea itself is like, well, if Chess, which is a very similar game,

[13:40] Matthew Harwit: can be this successful globally, then I don’t see any reason why Go can’t be. It’s just a matter of executing what

[13:48] Travis: makes PlayGo.gg feel different, necessary, compared to just other servers that you two have seen and maybe where things might fall short at a high level.

[14:01] Nathan Harwit: Yeah, I would say the biggest thing is that there’s a lot of different servers and places you can learn Go. There’s not really one central place where you can do everything.

[14:11] Nathan Harwit: So, for example, there’s Fox, which is the biggest Go server in the world, and it’s really good for playing Go.

[14:18] Nathan Harwit: But if you want to, like, watch videos, like, YouTube style or, like, Go Magic, like, videos,

[14:24] Nathan Harwit: as far as I can tell, they don’t really have that.

[14:26] Nathan Harwit: And so you’re mostly like, okay, I’LL go to Fox to play, I’ll go to Go Magic to learn. Then I’ll go to AI Sensei review.

[14:34] Nathan Harwit: And then it’s like you’re just spread out across everywhere and it’s kind of just jumping all over the place.

[14:39] Nathan Harwit: PlayGo.gg is just kind of one place. We did a lot of things similar to Chess.com, we’re like, okay, we want puzzle run for gamified puzzles, life and death.

[14:49] Nathan Harwit: We want AI review.

[14:51] Nathan Harwit: We want to be able to have a good server you can play onto.

[14:54] Nathan Harwit: There’s play feature. You can play against bots and stuff like that. So it’s kind of just one central place.

[15:00] Nathan Harwit: Whereas right now I feel like most other go places are just kind of all spread out.

[15:05] Travis: Yeah. And it’s interesting too, because when we’ve had our teaching sessions, we’ll sometimes briefly just. I’ll ask like, hey, like, how are things going? And I’ve sometimes played devil’s advocate, right.

[15:16] Travis: Just from my perspective, I’m like, okay,

[15:19] Travis: just through the podcast, learning about different servers, different sites, what they’re all trying to do,

[15:24] Travis: and I think one of the main things that surprised me is I’m like, wow,

[15:28] Travis: the speed with which there have been updates and changes has been pretty fast.

[15:34] Travis: You go from how things were maybe two or three months ago to how they’re today, and it’s like there’s all this functionality that wasn’t there.

[15:42] Travis: And I think we’ve even seen functionality mimicked by other servers because of what, you know, your team has done. Matthew, how would you augment that?

[15:52] Matthew Harwit: Yeah, so I guess my personal take on everything at the moment is that, like, various servers,

[15:59] Matthew Harwit: you know, even if we take functionality aside, I think just from like a social standpoint, there really isn’t any server that really markets itself well.

[16:09] Matthew Harwit: Like, for example, if I. If I look at OGS,

[16:11] Matthew Harwit: almost all of what I can tell the users is from, like, word of mouth. They don’t run any ads, they don’t host,

[16:18] Matthew Harwit: like, events that they stream. Like, I know they host tournaments, but they don’t stream anything. Right. And so then what happens is you kind of restrict yourself to a specific population, right?

[16:27] Matthew Harwit: Which is the population of people that play Go. And maybe for OGS, that is maybe one step down is it’s restricted to the amount of people that play Go in the West.

[16:38] Matthew Harwit: And so they’ve done a really great job of aggregating everybody and giving them a place to play. But the issue is like, well, you know, how do you go beyond that?

[16:46] Matthew Harwit: Like, how do you get people that don’t play Go to come in to play Go?

[16:50] Matthew Harwit: That is something that I don’t even say. It’s like they’re not doing a good job of. They just don’t do any job, right. They’re not doing anything when it comes to that, from what I can tell, right.

[16:58] Matthew Harwit: And maybe I’m wrong.

[16:59] Matthew Harwit: So to me, like, I think if I look at the success of Chess.com, and I look at the success of other games,

[17:06] Matthew Harwit: I think the thesis at present is there’s kind of two things to think about, right? So the first is like, how do you market yourself to a general,

[17:14] Matthew Harwit: wider audience and what does that mean for us? The model to replicate is with Chess.com is like we create a lot of events that are interesting to watch, right? So for example, our tournament that’s coming up on the 31st for people in the US right 1st of June, first for people in the eastern part of the world.

[17:32] Matthew Harwit: That is an event that I think a lot of people want to tune into because it’s like some of the best players in the world are playing in it, right?

[17:38] Matthew Harwit: And then if we add various things that make it fun to watch, like commentary, like various other things, we were considering having them start on like a random position on me 50, right.

[17:47] Matthew Harwit: Things like that I think just makes it fun to watch for people that play Go, but also is fun for people to watch that don’t play Go, right? And so that’s kind of the main thing is how do we grab those people in, right?

[17:57] Matthew Harwit: So I think doing some sort of social thing like this and then hopefully expanding upon it, right? So if this goes well, right. We host monthly tournaments, maybe even a year end world championship.

[18:07] Matthew Harwit: One thing probably a lot of people know and maybe some don’t know is that Go doesn’t really have like a real world champion. There’s a bunch of like what they consider as like international tournaments and the best of the best playing it.

[18:17] Matthew Harwit: And that’s kind of the metric by which you gauge how good somebody is, right? So Shin Jin-seo has like, I don’t know, I think it’s like nine international world championships, right?

[18:25] Matthew Harwit: But there’s no like one world champion, right? So thinking about, hey, how do we create that,

[18:30] Matthew Harwit: maybe we can bring go to the Esports World Cup, right? Like chess has done. So I think these are the things to think about and I think the other servers just like don’t do that.

[18:39] Matthew Harwit: Another thing that I think Go servers don’t do well is like there’s not as much of like a gamification baked in. Right. So when you think about other games,

[18:47] Matthew Harwit: like you think about League of Legends, what are some of the things that they have that like Go doesn’t have? Right. And like, what are the ways that they get people to come back?

[18:54] Matthew Harwit: What are the ways they get people to spend money and engage with the product? There’s a lot of different things. I mean, I don’t have to spell them out. Like, there’s just so many things that exist and those things that you could realistically apply to Go,

[19:05] Matthew Harwit: and people just aren’t doing that.

[19:07] Travis: Yeah, yeah. I appreciate both of your answers to that because I think there was an inflection point. The one was that by announcing the tournament and saying we’re not getting like some of the best players in the world, we’re getting like the best players in the world.

[19:21] Travis: Right. Number one,

[19:22] Travis: Shin Jin-seo. So you’re getting Choi Jeong, the best female player in the world, I believe, or was at one point, Kim Eun-ji. So you’re getting these very, very top level players.

[19:34] Travis: And that really says something.

[19:36] Nathan Harwit: Right?

[19:36] Travis: I mean, that really gets attention in a good way. I mean, at the end of the day, like, it is what it is. And so it sounds like what you’re telling me is that, like, if somebody’s tried it before, you know, I can’t see it now.

[19:47] Travis: But it’s like beyond people making models for having a teaching program.

[19:51] Matthew Harwit: Right.

[19:52] Travis: Which is a great thing. That’s very valuable thing, having a teaching program or a teaching website,

[19:57] Travis: but actually applying it to saying like, hey, let’s have a whole ecosystem that we actually try to market to the world. Nathan, we were talking at one point, you did the math.

[20:07] Travis: There were like tens of millions of people probably that know a board game like chess if they don’t know Go.

[20:14] Travis: If you get a fraction of the crossover of that I think you were saying, like, that could be very powerful.

[20:19] Travis: Okay, so now I wanted to just drill into some of the questions from the online community.

[20:25] Travis: First couple ones.

[20:26] Travis: Any thoughts on in game chat on PlayGo.gg and any reason to do an indication of like, what rule set is used in the game?

Community Questions and the Product Roadmap

[20:35] Nathan Harwit: Yeah, in general,

[20:37] Nathan Harwit: we’ve had a lot of requests for In Game Chat. It’s kind of too hard because it’s basically two of us full time, and it’s too hard to kind of moderate it and get it all set up.

[20:49] Nathan Harwit: And we decided that the impact wasn’t that high. Like it’s not super high priority. Like, we’re more focused on mobile application tournament and just making sure things don’t just like completely fall apart.

[21:01] Nathan Harwit: And it’s like, okay, we’re gonna add. Most likely gonna add in game chat at some point. It’s just not like right now. Like, it’s probably not happening for a few months.

[21:10] Nathan Harwit: And then. Oh, the question about the rule set.

[21:13] Nathan Harwit: People have asked one thing is I actually thought about adding it in a certain spot, but it was a little bit too crowded. So then I kind of just didn’t really add it.

[21:23] Nathan Harwit: So it’s kind of just like priorities. Obviously it’d be nice to just be like, oh, we’re playing Japanese rule set,

[21:28] Matthew Harwit: which is what we’re doing.

[21:29] Travis: So is that sort of the same concept with thinking about moderator tools and moderation systems? Is that the sort of like, hey, we’ll get to that at a point. I mean, certainly there can be cheating and sandbagging and those sorts of things.

[21:43] Nathan Harwit: Yeah, it kind of falls in the same category. We’ve had requests to kind of have. Well, we’ve thought about making like a community place. You can like, post and ask questions, kind of like OGS has.

[21:54] Nathan Harwit: And that could really help just organically get people onto our site.

[21:58] Nathan Harwit: The problem is what we have. We’re supporting, I think six or seven languages right now. It’s just way too hard. Like, we don’t know Japanese, for example. If somebody says something bad in Japanese, who’s going to take care of it?

[22:10] Nathan Harwit: We don’t have the moderation team and the resources to kind of deal with. Deal with that. And so we decide, okay, it’s a little too risky to do that now.

[22:18] Nathan Harwit: The goal is like, okay, when we get bigger and we have more resources,

[22:22] Nathan Harwit: we can spend more time on that when that time comes.

[22:26] Travis: There was a question that I think somebody was just talking about, like the good old days of KGS and this whole concept of like the kibitz culture, which I think just means, again, I wasn’t there.

[22:36] Travis: Right. I didn’t know it. I think down the road, you two feel like, hey, there’s a good chance we could get to this place where,

[22:42] Travis: yeah, maybe if there’s more visibility with this game in the west through PlayGo.gg.

[22:48] Travis: Yeah, we could get to a point where there’s just like 10 or 15 people watching somebody’s game online. And then they’re. They’re giving comments about it and they’re giving reviews about it.

[22:56] Travis: I mean, do you two have any thoughts on it?

[22:58] Matthew Harwit: This also kind of ties into what Nathan was talking about earlier. I mean, part like this tournament, actually one of the things that like, of course we want to do with it is kind of announce ourselves to the world, but also, you know, start to build this brand around creating events for people to watch and bringing in new people.

[23:14] Matthew Harwit: Right. That’s a big part of what we’re doing, but also in tandem, it has a lot of other purposes. Right. And one of them is, I think we’re pretty much at a point where we can probably raise some significant money for this project.

[23:25] Matthew Harwit: And once we do do that, then we can start to hire some people to specifically tackle some of these things that we just don’t have the bandwidth to do. Right.

[23:34] Matthew Harwit: And so tying it all together, I would say that is what we’re trying to do.

[23:38] Matthew Harwit: With regard to the kibbutz culture specifically, I would say.

[23:41] Matthew Harwit: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s actually a lot of really unique things we can do nowadays that.

[23:47] Matthew Harwit: Do you want me to share about the prediction thing that you wanted to do?

[23:50] Nathan Harwit: Sure. I mean it’s going to be on the website in 10 days for the tournament anyways.

[23:54] Matthew Harwit: Yeah. So I think one of the tying this into kind of the watching the game and kind of talking about and things like that, I mean, one of the things that we’ve thought about as kind of something that’d be interesting to implement is kind of like a prediction system.

[24:06] Matthew Harwit: Right. So I mean nowadays you look and you know, I think everybody will have their own take on Kalshi and these types of gamble on anything type of websites. But one of the things that we thought about would be, oh, it’d be kind of interesting is basically introduce some sort of prediction mechanism.

[24:20] Matthew Harwit: So like, let’s say every, you know, five moves or 10 moves, you can predict if like the next move that’s going to happen is going to be like within,

[24:28] Matthew Harwit: let’s say, oh, is it going to be within a top five AI move? Is it going to be within like a certain point loss? Is it going to be higher than 30% heat map recommendation?

[24:36] Matthew Harwit: Right. Things like that. And so when you combine that with kibbits. Right. Talking about the game and then being able to like predict things like that, I think it makes it much more engaging and you can start to build community and various things along those lines.

[24:48] Matthew Harwit: And then we’ve also had, I mean we have so many ideas that are just being worked on behind the scenes. But one of them I’ll leak a little bit about is like kind of having this entire world immersive experience within the website where you kind of have kind of Lore.

[25:01] Matthew Harwit: Right. That ties to, like, you know, the history of Go or like a world built around Go. And then you can have, like, various different cities, and then you can have kind of like bosses within those cities that have, like, different ranks that play a specific style of Go.

[25:13] Matthew Harwit: And you can learn how to, like, get better at a specific style of Go through playing them and various things like that. So I think, like, what we really want to create is like, I think a community and you build, like, various things around it to make it much more engaging for people that are part of it.

[25:25] Matthew Harwit: So I guess, bottom line, what I’m trying to say is like, yes, I think these types of. The cultural thing to me is really important.

[25:31] Matthew Harwit: And creating culture and community within the game of Go within our website are things that we’ve thought a lot about it. Just there’s a lot of things being worked on, and hopefully we can emulate some of the things that made these other websites so endearing.

[25:44] Travis: Yeah.

[25:46] Travis: One question that came up was about,

[25:49] Travis: I think you two might be familiar with projects like WeiqiHub that try to unify multiple servers under one client. And,

[25:55] Travis: you know, would PlayGo.gg support projects like that with an open API? My guess would be that you two are actually trying to go sort of in. The project is trying to go in its own direction.

[26:04] Travis: But, I mean, anything to add to that?

[26:07] Nathan Harwit: Yeah, so it’s like, again, it’s like resources. So it’s like, we definitely could consider it.

[26:13] Nathan Harwit: But part of the problem with that too is, like,

[26:16] Nathan Harwit: we’ve tried to work with other groups, like OGS, for example,

[26:22] Nathan Harwit: and after you discuss it for a while, it’s like, they don’t want to do something. We want to do it a certain way. They don’t want it. So it’s like just like, really hard to actually work with them.

[26:31] Nathan Harwit: I think Matthew and I are very open to experimenting and doing different things and doing things, like, differently.

[26:40] Nathan Harwit: And some of these other groups might not be as interested in that. And so it’s a little bit tricky to work with them. But we are like, we’ve talked with OGS.

[26:50] Nathan Harwit: I know Akita Noek very well.

[26:52] Travis: You did the Kids Go Server together, right, for the American Go Foundation.

[26:55] Nathan Harwit: I mean, you started the Kids Go Server, and I’m actively working on it. We’re adding some animations and stuff now.

[27:02] Travis: But yeah,

[27:05] Travis: let’s shift gears a little bit. One question was just more around how you two might envision playgo GG eventually maybe starting to support players in the west and stronger players there.

Supporting Strong Players and Growing Go Globally

[27:19] Matthew Harwit: Yeah, I mean, so I think the answer of course is yes.

[27:22] Matthew Harwit: It always comes down to like,

[27:24] Matthew Harwit: how do we do it and when do we do it, more than whether or not we will do it.

[27:29] Matthew Harwit: And so I can give an example, right? Like recently we’ve been talking to the,

[27:33] Matthew Harwit: it’s called the Hangzhou Qiyuan. It’s, it’s basically like a very big kind of arm for Go in China.

[27:40] Matthew Harwit: They have like, I think more than like two thirds of the active Chinese pros, like train specifically at that location. I think it’s government funded and supported.

[27:48] Matthew Harwit: They have a lot of resources. You know, we reach out to them and said, hey, it was kind of for the tournaments that we’re setting up because like, you know, we want to have more of these tournaments.

[27:55] Matthew Harwit: And one of the ideas is to have like a.

[27:58] Matthew Harwit: I’ll leak a little bit is to have like a team tournament. So like China versus Japan versus Korea, right? Which is something that’s really popular for the Nongshim Cup. It’s like by far the most watched Go event every year because I think there’s a lot of like national pride online,

[28:11] Matthew Harwit: right? So, so long story short, like we want to do something similar and so we’ve been talking to China trying to get the top Chinese players to play in it.

[28:18] Matthew Harwit: And so through that we got to know these, these guys. And so one of the things that they really want to do is actually quite similar to what we want to do, which is to like get more people to play Go in the world.

[28:28] Matthew Harwit: And so one of the things that kind of is brought up was like, oh, like they want people that are strong and pros and whatnot to like go to their place to study.

[28:37] Matthew Harwit: They want to become like the hub for kind of strong players to aggregate together and train and play,

[28:43] Matthew Harwit: for example, right? In the future maybe we could have the stronger Western players,

[28:48] Matthew Harwit: hopefully get some sort of financial support to go there to train, right? That might be one thing that we could do. And then so I mean there’s a lot of things like that and like, I think again, like, it’s too early, but we want to do things like not just like one time things like that,

[29:00] Matthew Harwit: but probably also like in the long term build up the infrastructure for creating,

[29:05] Matthew Harwit: you know, people that train and do go at a high level, right? If you think about China and Korea and these places, there’s like specifically Go schools that kids go to and train from at a young age.

[29:14] Matthew Harwit: Like I think we got pretty good at Go, but we’re not pros. And maybe if we were in China, we’d be competing in these big tournaments and trajectory might have looked different.

[29:22] Matthew Harwit: Right. And so it’s a long process, but I think, for sure, like, we want to support Go players everywhere, not just in the West. And so there’s. There’s a lot of things we can do, but we’ll take it step by step.

[29:33] Nathan Harwit: Yeah.

[29:35] Travis: So just to kind of wrap up a little bit, what do you two think has been the hardest aspect of building the platform right now?

[29:48] Nathan Harwit: Hardest thing for me is to juggle priorities because there’s a lot of user requests in discord.

[29:55] Nathan Harwit: Like, we want to keep making it better based on user feedback, so we have an update every week,

[30:00] Nathan Harwit: and then it’s like, okay, how do I balance that with, like, we want to make sure the tournament goes well and we want to make sure stuff is stable. Obviously, if like, a million people show up, it’s not going to go very well, but it’s like, okay, I’m building,

[30:13] Nathan Harwit: like, a prediction system right now where it’s like, okay,

[30:18] Nathan Harwit: you paused the move. You can’t see the AI recommendations. The move is played in real time.

[30:23] Nathan Harwit: And then you guess, like, is it the top AI move? And then is it a likely human move? And then you get points based on. And then we give out some subscriptions for free if you’re, like, in the top five.

[30:33] Nathan Harwit: And if you participate, you get a subscription to some percentage chance or whatever. So it’s like, how do I balance user feedback and working on new things with, like,

[30:44] Nathan Harwit: don’t want to just brush them all off for a couple weeks.

[30:47] Nathan Harwit: I am also working on the mobile app, so it’s like, there’s an approval process and it’s like, as the regular website gets built,

[30:55] Nathan Harwit: then the mobile app needs to catch up with it. And so it’s like, okay, there’s just a lot of things going on, so it’s hard for me to figure out how to prioritize certain things right now.

[31:05] Travis: And so, Nathan, I take it you’re really focusing a lot of the technical aspects of the project and getting things in the right direction on a daily basis.

[31:14] Travis: Matthew, where are your focuses?

[31:17] Matthew Harwit: Uh, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, like Nathan said, we’re a very small team, so I really try to do a bit of everything. So, like, I. I help code,

[31:25] Matthew Harwit: and I also do a lot of the marketing stuff and building relationships with people and things along those lines, which I think, I guess sounds trivial, but it’s actually a lot of work as well.

[31:34] Matthew Harwit: But, yeah, I. I mean, I think in general, like,

[31:37] Matthew Harwit: my Take is everything’s kind of hard.

[31:39] Matthew Harwit: Uh, you can say everything’s kind of hard. You can say everything’s easy. In my opinion, it’s just about how you view things.

[31:44] Matthew Harwit: I mean, for me specifically,

[31:45] Matthew Harwit: every junction has kind of different things that I would consider, like, make it hard. Right. Like, I think for us,

[31:51] Matthew Harwit: you know, we started this in September of 2025. So it’s been what, eight, nine months? Ish. And I think at the beginning, the hard part was, you know, we’re building something and we don’t have any proof that people will want it because it takes time to build something that is good enough to have people use.

[32:06] Matthew Harwit: Right. And so for us,

[32:07] Matthew Harwit: at that point, we opened up things to a beta, closed beta, around like January or so.

[32:13] Matthew Harwit: And so we had like a couple hundred people join the website for the first time. I think maybe like a hundred or two hundred people signed up and we were at like, I don’t know, like 30 people per day using it or something.

[32:23] Matthew Harwit: I wouldn’t say it was bad. I just thought, like, well, you know, I don’t really know what to expect type of situation.

[32:28] Travis: Right.

[32:29] Matthew Harwit: And so the hardest thing there was, like, it wasn’t even necessarily motivation, but of course, that definitely has some play into it. Like, you know, especially when you post on Reddit, you know, the people there can be sometimes, and, you know, it is what it is, right?

[32:41] Matthew Harwit: They can get to you more when you don’t have anything and you start to doubt, like, you know, maybe these guys are right. And so that was probably the hardest part then.

[32:48] Matthew Harwit: But then, you know, after we launched, we had like,

[32:50] Matthew Harwit: so many people using the website on, like, the first few days that, like, our website kept crashing.

[32:55] Matthew Harwit: And so then the concern was a problem.

[32:57] Nathan Harwit: Yeah, great problem.

[32:58] Matthew Harwit: Right. But then, like, it’s like, oh, like, maybe we’re onto something. And then, like, making sure everything’s stable, making sure everything’s working.

[33:05] Matthew Harwit: I think that night I, like, went to bed early and then, you know, Nathan usually wakes up, like, pretty late. And so I got up at like 8 and he was up, and I was like, oh, are you upset?

[33:14] Matthew Harwit: I was like, oh, I didn’t sleep. I was like, oh, why didn’t you sleep? And then he explained to me, because this, everything kept crashing, blah, blah, blah, and he tried to fix things.

[33:20] Matthew Harwit: So it was just, I think every stage has different things to be concerned about. Right. Like now, I think, you know, for us, the hard part as well, things are going in the right direction, but how do we kind of continue to build momentum Right now, one of the things that we’re thinking about as well,

[33:34] Matthew Harwit: we need, like, more people to be working on this because, like, there’s simply too many things for us to do, too many opportunities to explore that. We can’t really handle it on our own with our small team.

[33:45] Matthew Harwit: And it’s not just me and Nathan. Like, we have Hiru, who we mentioned earlier, helping us in Japan. He’s been super helpful. We have Eric.

[33:51] Matthew Harwit: I want to shout out.

[33:53] Matthew Harwit: He’s actually one of my Go students for a long time as well. We run the Go Congress. He’s been helping a lot with various different efforts. So. And of course we have our third co founder.

[34:01] Matthew Harwit: So I think everybody’s doing as much as they can or you’re putting in quite a bit of effort, right? But it’s just like, I think the hard part now is like, well, we probably need to make some structural changes and that, you know, requires various different things.

[34:13] Matthew Harwit: And so we have to juggle that while juggling all the things that are going on. So that’s what I think is the hardest part now. But like I said, I think, you know, every phase will have different things that make things difficult.

[34:23] Matthew Harwit: And it’s good. I mean, it’s a good problem to have and we’ll continue to do our best to tackle them as we move forward.

[34:30] Travis: What’s been easier than you expected in this process? Anything where you’re like, wow, I thought

[34:34] Nathan Harwit: this was going to be so hard and it wasn’t.

[34:37] Matthew Harwit: I think for me, like, people in the Go world are like, ready for something revolutionary and not saying that we will be. Of course I hope we will be. And what I mean by that is, like, you might expect it’d be a lot harder to do things specifically with, like,

[34:50] Matthew Harwit: the top players, right? So, like,

[34:51] Matthew Harwit: I remember reading some of the comments of like, oh, how did they get these guys like Shin Jin-seo to play in this,

[34:57] Matthew Harwit: right? And it’s like some guy put like $3 signs and then some other guy put like $5 signs. So it was funny. It was. It was good banter. But to me, it’s like, you know, we don’t have that much money, so obviously that’s not the answer.

[35:07] Matthew Harwit: It has to be something else entirely. And it’s like, well, you know, I felt like building the relationship with Shin Jin-seo, like, getting in front of him and then building the relationship with him and these other top players was something that, you know, I can’t speak for every pro,

[35:18] Matthew Harwit: but for the ones that I’ve interacted with especially Shin Jin-seo and Kim Ji-seok. Those two specifically shout out. Have been super supportive from the beginning.

[35:26] Matthew Harwit: Like the way that, you know, Shin Jin-seo communicates, like, at least with me has like, I. I don’t feel like he’s like the best player in the world, if that makes sense.

[35:33] Matthew Harwit: Right. Like you would think, like Magnus.

[35:36] Travis: Yeah.

[35:37] Matthew Harwit: You, like, have some air to him. You know what I mean? Like, it’s. Yes. Like it’s hard to talk to him or whatever, but it’s not like that at all. And I think, like,

[35:45] Matthew Harwit: I mean, maybe it’s just I was fortunate or, you know, reached out at the right time, but I think he wrote a book.

[35:50] Matthew Harwit: In the book, there’s various things that he talks about where he wants to make Go more popular.

[35:54] Matthew Harwit: And so I think some people can say that and then like, not actually do it, but I think like the fact that he’s playing in this tournament from, from our perspective, kind of a no name company compared to these other ones at present is like a vote of confidence.

[36:05] Matthew Harwit: Right. And I think, like,

[36:07] Matthew Harwit: that has been a lot easier than I would have expected.

[36:10] Matthew Harwit: It’s great. I mean, it’s a good, very good thing to have.

Building Quickly with AI and a Small Team

[36:13] Nathan Harwit: Yeah. I would say, just in general,

[36:15] Nathan Harwit: when people are really passionate about trying to work towards the same mission of like making Go more popular in general, like Shin Jin-seo. And some others,

[36:24] Nathan Harwit: it was not that hard. I mean, Matthew’s mostly doing it, but just from me observing it, it’s like not that difficult for like them to just communicate or to get on board.

[36:33] Nathan Harwit: It’s not like, oh, they say something and they ghost you, or you have to like go through five people. It’s just like you go straight to them and they’re actually more interested than we thought in general.

[36:43] Nathan Harwit: And then I would say the thing I think that’s gone easier or gone better than I would imagine is just the technical aspect and the code.

[36:53] Nathan Harwit: Because with AI it’s been a lot faster.

[36:57] Nathan Harwit: We pump out code faster, we have a lot more problems that we have to fix, but it ends up we can get feedback on what we do faster because it’s like, okay, here’s 10 changes.

[37:07] Nathan Harwit: What do we think? Where are the bugs? Okay, then we fix them.

[37:10] Nathan Harwit: Whereas before,

[37:11] Nathan Harwit: like all the AI tools and stuff, it might have been three times slower. So then it’d be like, okay, when we started in September to when we did the closed beta in January, that was about three months,

[37:21] Nathan Harwit: maybe that would have been nine months. And then you’re like burning three times the money and you’re trying to figure out if anyone would ever pay or even use the website in the first place.

[37:30] Nathan Harwit: So that’s one thing that I’ve been quite surprised with. Just AI capabilities and when you use it enough and then you’re like, okay, yeah, it’s actually going pretty fast.

[37:40] Travis: And I think you’re hitting on this nerve or this sort of general overview which is like again, to use the analogy, like, are you a Chess.com or a Lichess?

[37:49] Travis: One can be. You have a whole lot of people collaborating and working on something.

[37:54] Travis: It’s going to be slower almost by design because you’re just getting more feedback, more input. There can be a lot of great things to that. The other way is you can have fewer people doing those things and making those decisions.

[38:06] Travis: The upside to it is that things can kind of get done and put out quicker. There’s a benefit to that too.

[38:12] Travis: I mean, something you said Matthew, a moment ago about,

[38:16] Travis: you know, some of the reactions around like, hey, how did you get, you know, Shin Jin-seo? So and these sorts of things and like dollar signs,

[38:21] Travis: I’m kind of like, so what,

[38:23] Travis: what if it was money? We have some resources. Like is that not a good way to provide incentive? Like particularly in America,

[38:31] Travis: if you want people to care about something, you’re like, hey, we’re going to bring the top people here with a few dollars, with some resources and that’s going to get you engaged.

[38:42] Travis: You know, you’re also cultivating the project is also cultivating the relationships, which is great. But let’s be real, right? Like resources matter.

[38:49] Travis: And so it’s a big piece of that. And so it’s like my reaction is sort of like, so what?

[38:56] Travis: So last thing before we let you Go is a recap of battle of the sexes. So it’s coming up May 31 or June 1, depending on what part of the globe you’re on.

[39:08] Travis: We have, you know, Shin Jin-seo number one player in the world. We have Kim Eun-ji,

[39:13] Travis: Choi Jeong Kim Ji-seok.

[39:16] Travis: These are all just top, top level players.

[39:19] Travis: Don’t you have Michael Redmond 9 dan commentating? Is that correct?

[39:24] Matthew Harwit: That’s right.

[39:25] Travis: So again like the voice of English-speaking Go on it as well.

[39:30] Travis: So I think just a lot of us saw this and we were just incredibly excited. Like I remember Nathan, like we happened to be having our teaching session. You’re like, oh, by the way, like we’re just about to release it and you sent it to me and it’s like I almost fell over in my chair.

[39:42] Travis: I was like, oh my goodness, you guys did it. So I know that there are people really rooting for this project before I let you guys go. Like, anything else that you want to add or anything you want to put out there?

[39:57] Matthew Harwit: Yeah, I would say,

[39:58] Matthew Harwit: I think certainly everything takes money. At the end of the day,

[40:02] Matthew Harwit: there’s no way to work around that.

[40:04] Matthew Harwit: And so, yeah, I agree with your sentiment of the so what I think like, you know, one of the things we want to do is, you know, raise money and use that to grow the game.

[40:13] Matthew Harwit: I mean, that’s just fundamentally what we want to do and create value by doing that. And so I think, yeah, that’s definitely going to be part of what we do in the future.

[40:20] Matthew Harwit: And I think,

[40:22] Matthew Harwit: you know, hopefully we’re starting to roll this little snowball and it’s going to get bigger and bigger and we’ll have bigger events. Like, I think this one is a great, really good first event to have.

[40:30] Matthew Harwit: And like, you know, I alluded to earlier, like we’ll hopefully have bigger tournaments, bigger stakes, bigger prize pools, bigger audiences, just bigger everything. That’s how you spread Go. Right?

[40:40] Matthew Harwit: My mom can like see go on ESPN someday. I mean, that’d be sick, right? I mean that’s, that’s kind of. You got. Everybody’s got to start somewhere and I think this is a great start and I hope that it’s just the beginning and that we can do much bigger things in the future.

[40:54] Travis: Excellent. I think this is a good place to end. So Matthew Nathan,

[40:59] Travis: thank you so much. Everybody should go out there and check out PlayGo.gg and yeah, appreciate it.

[41:05] Nathan Harwit: Thanks for having

Closing Thoughts

[41:22] Travis: That’s the end of our conversation. I hope you enjoyed it and definitely tune in for the tournament that’s going to be coming up because it sounds like it could be exciting and change things up quite a bit and get to see some of the best players in the world and yeah,

[41:37] Travis: it’ll just be a good time.

[41:38] Travis: Thanks for listening and catch you next time. This is All Things Go.

[41:58] Travis: On a final note, I just want to thank again our sponsors for the episode. SmartGo One is your all in one Go toolkit for iPhone, iPad and Mac.

[42:07] Travis: Whether you’re replaying games, solving problems or managing your SGF files,

[42:11] Travis: it includes a massive professional game library, a strong KataGo engine and polished recording tools so you can study master games, play the AI and cleanly record your own over the board games all in one place.

[42:24] Travis: Our other sponsor is Baduk Pop, which is an app that makes go simple and fun to learn. With interactive puzzles,

[42:31] Travis: short lessons, and an AI tutor that helps you improve wherever you are.

[42:35] Travis: It also gives you daily ranked problems that adjust to your level,

[42:38] Travis: themed sets like Life and Death and tesuji+AI and online play so you can practice and then test what you’ve learned.

[42:45] Travis: You can check it out at BadukPop.com. That’s B A D U K P O P Com.