All Things Go Podcast

[00:00] Travis: I hadn't really heard of people who are very good in chess and also very good in Go explicitly. Like I hadn't seen a specific example.

[00:10] Travis: And as maybe some of us do,

[00:13] Travis: I sometimes dabble and listen to chess podcasts even though I don't play chess.

[00:19] Travis: I understand and know how it's played, but I don't really play it.

[00:23] Travis: But I early on, before I started the podcast, I wanted to get a

[00:27] Travis: sense for how some of these chess

[00:29] Travis: podcasts were working, as I know some of the other content providers in the

[00:33] Travis: Go world have done.

[00:34] Travis: There is the Perpetual Chess Podcast with Ben Johnson,

[00:39] Travis: who's a pretty long running, long standing person who's done many episodes and lo and behold I've listened to some episodes here and there regularly. And in episode 399,

[00:53] Travis: all of a sudden he speaks to a chess grandmaster named Tiger Hillarp Persson.

[00:59] Travis: In the title it says he's a two time Swedish champion,

[01:02] Travis: author and Go master, which of course piqued my interest. So I said let me listen to this interview and really, really cool. He's a grandmaster who is a little bit later stage, I believe he's in his 50s or 60s.

[01:18] Travis: He only got into Go relatively recently, I think in the last few years.

[01:24] Travis: But he's been a chess player his whole life and he's a grandmaster. So clearly he has incredible analytical ability. And he was talking in the interview about how getting into Go and playing was so refreshing for him because it reminded him of what it was like to be a beginner in something again.

[01:43] Travis: He teaches at these chess schools and things like this. And so he said it was just really great to see things from that perspective again, particularly when he's teaching people and chess is sort of taking a bit of a backseat.

[01:56] Travis: But he is apparently a 3 dan with the European Go Federation, so he's clearly a very high level player.

[02:05] Travis: Certainly not 9 dan, but I believe he was playing in some level of championship somewhere in Europe.

[02:12] Travis: So apparently his chess skill and talent really came into play because he has an incredible ability to read, I think much more than your normal person.

[02:23] Travis: So it was really cool. I highly recommend the episode if you get to check it out. The perpetual chess podcast, episode 399. Who knows, maybe we can get him on the show sometime.

[02:35] Travis: This is all Things Go.

Interview: Will Lockhart and Cole Pruitt on The Surrounding Game

[02:55] Travis: Now. We're going to head into our last interview of the season and this is with two people who are responsible for the creation of one of the big pieces of media we have in the west, in English for Go.

[03:08] Travis: So I was able to talk with Will Lockhart and Cole Pruitt, the creators of the surrounding game documentary.

[03:16] Travis: So we're going to jump into that now.

[03:21] Travis: Will and Cole, thanks so much for being here.

[03:24] Cole Pruitt: Happy to join.

[03:25] Travis: First thing, I wanted to ask both of you, what are your Go origin stories? So how did you get into the game?

[03:32] Will Lockhart: So I started Go a little bit younger than Cole, which was just, you know, you know, I think everybody's origin,

[03:38] Will Lockhart: at least in the west, there's a certain amount of luck involved. I was always into games.

[03:43] Will Lockhart: So my dad is a mathematician and he was a math teacher for a long time.

[03:47] Will Lockhart: So math and puzzles and mind sports and games were always just sort of around as I was growing up. And I started playing chess probably around age 8.

[03:57] Will Lockhart: I wasn't a super serious chess player, but I enjoyed it and played with my dad. And he actually had a Go board. He wasn't really an active player, but he knew of the game from when he was in grad school.

[04:10] Will Lockhart: Actually. His PhD advisor was like a 2 dan player.

[04:14] Will Lockhart: And so he knew of it. He had a set up on the mantle, collecting dust from years before.

[04:20] Will Lockhart: And at some point, my brother and I were old enough and curious enough to be like, what's that game?

[04:26] Will Lockhart: So he taught us the rules and we started playing. And then it was, as many Americans, it was Hikaru no Go that it didn't introduce us to go, but it really lit a fire under our *** and we got super into it at that point.

[04:38] Will Lockhart: And when people ask me, man, how did you become a dan player? Like, how did you get good at this game? I always say the most important thing is to have a younger brother who you can't stand beating.

[04:48] Travis: You never underestimate sibling rivalry.

[04:51] Will Lockhart: Exactly. Truly.

[04:53] Travis: And Will, I do want to say, you know, obviously, the very untimely passing of your brother, who just seemed like an incredible force. So, you know, my condolences to you and your family.

[05:03] Travis: And Cole. How is your story different?

[05:05] Cole Pruitt: Yeah. So like Will, I grew up playing games,

[05:09] Cole Pruitt: being interested in mathematics, arithmetic, puzzles.

[05:13] Cole Pruitt: On my end it was cards. I played bridge, I played cards with my grandparents, I played cards with my family, which we still do to this day. Cards were kind of the main arena for that kind of fun and thinking.

[05:26] Cole Pruitt: I played chess as well. Was really into chess in high school, middle school,

[05:31] Cole Pruitt: but I didn't really get into Go until I went to college. And actually,

[05:34] Cole Pruitt: strangely, I remember in my sophomore year, the summer that I came home to Missouri on the winter break, I got it in my mind that I was Going to make a Go board.

[05:45] Cole Pruitt: I had never really played Go. Like maybe I had played one game, but I just thought it looked really cool. And I guess I just. The aesthetic of it really spoke to me.

[05:54] Cole Pruitt: And so I got out a router and I just drew up,

[05:58] Cole Pruitt: not knowing, having played that no one actually carves lines into a Go board. You like, you. You put ink down on them and you know, so I didn't really know.

[06:06] Cole Pruitt: But I made this board, which I still have actually.

[06:09] Cole Pruitt: I brought it back to school with me and I found someone,

[06:12] Cole Pruitt: a Chinese student colleague of mine, you know, friend of mine who was about a 1 dan, and I was 30. I didn't know anything. We sat down and played a game and he patiently played for the whole hour.

[06:22] Cole Pruitt: It was very generous of him to sit and play this game against me.

[06:26] Cole Pruitt: After that, I promptly forgot about it for a year. And then a year later, I again had some time and said, you know, I should come back to this. He was really good.

[06:32] Cole Pruitt: I should figure out what this game is about.

[06:34] Cole Pruitt: And that was just the time when Will had co founded the Brown Go Club. This would have been in 2010.

[06:41] Cole Pruitt: And so it was perfect timing where I had that summer in 2010 and I started playing against the available computer programs then I didn't really know anybody in person who played.

[06:51] Cole Pruitt: And then that fall show up at the Brown Go Club and there's this array of players from about my level really didn't know what they were doing. Up to Will, who's 5 dan.

[07:01] Cole Pruitt: So it's this Runway for me to be able to start playing against people and getting better and better.

[07:06] Cole Pruitt: So I was off to the races at that point.

[07:08] Will Lockhart: That was your honeymoon phase?

[07:10] Cole Pruitt: Oh, absolutely. I was a rocket ship.

[07:13] Travis: What do you two think is going on in terms of you played chess, you like chess, among other things,

[07:20] Travis: and then Go sort of took over from chess. Is there any sense you can make of it?

[07:26] Will Lockhart: Yeah, I mean, I think it's a common story in the west, chess being much more popular.

[07:30] Will Lockhart: So I think part of it is just that people are more likely to be exposed to chess first because it has more of a presence. But I also think there's a lot of different kinds of games out there.

[07:40] Will Lockhart: Right. And board games are having a big renaissance.

[07:43] Will Lockhart: Not just games like Chess and Go, but games very much on the other end.

[07:47] Will Lockhart: Go especially has this aesthetic of being incredibly simple. Right. Incredibly beautiful and yet complex.

[07:55] Will Lockhart: There are all these games that are very popular that are the opposite, that have tons of rules and different pieces and, you know, you open these beautiful modern board games and there's this giant list of rules it takes two hours to get through.

[08:08] Will Lockhart: And that's just a different aesthetic, right? I mean, we can get on our high horse and talk about how Go is so great, but I think partly it just appeals to a certain aesthetic that I have and Cole and many other Go players where once you see how much complexity can emerge from such simplicity,

[08:24] Will Lockhart: it's astonishing. And you just have to go down that rabbit hole and try to understand that whole process, right, of how you can go from rules you could write on a napkin to the deepest game ever created.

[08:36] Will Lockhart: So I think something about that paradox of emergent complexity for me is what grabbed me and never let go.

[08:44] Travis: And Cole, the story of you having this dan level player very patiently go through the first game with you,

[08:51] Travis: I do wonder if that might be something more unique to playing Go in the west among other board games. Because it is a lesser known game, that dan level player just might be a lot more willing to play with, you know, a brand new player just to really get more people into it and playing with it.

[09:12] Cole Pruitt: It's a funny thing. I went to grad school in St. Louis, which has a huge chess culture and scene. The World Chess hall of fame is in St. Louis. There's a lot of professional players, there's been international title matches.

[09:24] Cole Pruitt: I've been to the chess club there. It's a very welcoming place. It's well put together.

[09:29] Cole Pruitt: But I think certainly at the Go clubs that I've been to, there's just a real generosity and willingness to kind of pour out what one's excitement and enthusiasm for the game in a way that is not always there.

[09:40] Cole Pruitt: When I meet people who play chess, certainly there are chess players who are as generous and as enthusiastic, but there's so much consistency in the Go community.

[09:48] Cole Pruitt: If you find someone who's 15 stones stronger than you, often they're happy to play a teaching game or show you something interesting or if you're the same level. That also has its own advantages because, wow, finding someone who has my same level of experience because there's so much depth in the game,

[10:04] Cole Pruitt: that's really special too.

[10:06] Cole Pruitt: A couple weeks ago, I walked into a Go club in Denver, Colorado when I happened to be there. And it's great to walk in and you don't know if the person across from you is going to be 10 stones stronger or 10 stones weaker.

[10:16] Cole Pruitt: And so there's a serendipity to that which is really,

[10:19] Cole Pruitt: really rewarding. And it's something That I don't feel as much quite from chess or bridge or these other kind of classic games.

[10:26] Travis: Let's dive into the film, into the documentary a bit.

[10:29] Travis: I'm going to start with the name. How did you both think about landing on the name, the surrounding game versus its name in Japan, in China, in Korea, of Go Baduk Weiqi.

[10:43] Will Lockhart: The surrounding game is a direct translation of the Chinese name for the game Weiqi. Chinese chess is called xiangqi.

[10:50] Will Lockhart: So the chi is something like game, and the wei in Weiqi means surrounding.

[10:54] Will Lockhart: And it was honestly just a working title for a long time. I'm not sure how we first proposed it. I think for a long time we thought, oh, well, that's.

[11:03] Will Lockhart: It's a little too plain or maybe there'll be a subtitle or something else. But I think the simplicity of it really grew on me over time.

[11:11] Will Lockhart: And, you know, we got feedback from people too. You know, oh, what do you think of this name? And I think our vision of the film changed a lot over time from when we first started.

[11:20] Will Lockhart: One of the main motivations was simply to document the world of Go, which is such a beautiful and rich culture,

[11:28] Will Lockhart: and especially at that time, was very little known. And so simply exposing people to this thing was one of the goals. And so just naming it what it is, this is the surrounding game.

[11:38] Will Lockhart: And there was also sort of this sense, a little bit of it being the literal translation. But also one of the themes of the film is obsession, if you will, and dedication and just making your whole life revolve around this game and wrestling with whether that's a noble pursuit or a waste of time or both,

[11:55] Will Lockhart: somehow. And so being sort of surrounded by the game has a bit of a double meaning.

[12:02] Travis: So if we set the stage, the documentary effectively goes through a few different areas. It both reviews the history of Go in Asia. You interview top world professionals, which is amazing and phenomenal.

[12:18] Travis: You also then follow several teenagers in America. So you're following Will, you're following your brother Ben, Andy Liu, Calvin Sun, Curtis Tang, as they strive to be the first American professionals.

[12:32] Travis: And it's interesting to see this contrast.

[12:38] Travis: It's actually refreshing in a way, right, because you go into the very deep background of this game, thousands of years of history,

[12:46] Travis: and then all of a sudden you're zooming in to a very different experience as a teenager in America,

[12:53] Travis: you know,

[12:54] Travis: dumping the potato chips into, like, a bad car as you're beatboxing and, like, driving down the road.

[13:00] Travis: So when we think about that stage, the first thing that really struck me Was that this was the first time that professional Go players were certified outside of Asia.

[13:11] Travis: Was it an obvious choice? Or was it simply serendipity that the stars aligned to film the certification tournament?

[13:20] Cole Pruitt: While we had some motivations to film in advance, we had thought the spring before the Pro Qualifier turn, well, there's lots of things we want to cover in the world of Go.

[13:29] Cole Pruitt: There's, as you mentioned, the history talk to professional players, Go schools in Asia, Go equipment, the beauty of Go culture.

[13:37] Cole Pruitt: The start of the American pro system was really the spark that said, not only would it be interesting to film, and there's a story there, but it has to happen now.

[13:46] Will Lockhart: Yeah, I was gonna say, I don't know that we would've made the film if it hadn't happened. Not because it wouldn't have been worth it, but just it was that last straw where we were like, okay, we really have something here.

[13:55] Will Lockhart: We're really in the right place at the right time. If the pro system had not been announced very unexpectedly, by the way, I think now it's 10 years on, people have gotten somewhat used to the idea that there's a U. S.

[14:06] Will Lockhart: pro system. You know, there's a line in the movie from Keith Arnold, who's been one of the most dedicated organizers for a long time.

[14:13] Will Lockhart: He says, when they first proposed this, I derided the idea that this country was ready for a pro system.

[14:19] Will Lockhart: It was laughable,

[14:20] Will Lockhart: even the organizers saying that. And on the other hand,

[14:24] Will Lockhart: it was an opportunity. They had a sponsor from Korea. When is this opportunity ever going to come again? Right. And so it was like an offer they couldn't refuse.

[14:32] Will Lockhart: And yet it was totally stepping into the unknown.

[14:36] Will Lockhart: Cole and I met in college. We met through the Brown University Go club.

[14:41] Will Lockhart: We were very excited about Go. We were running some tournaments. We were doing organizing. We co founded the American College Go association with two other folks. That was in 2010, 2011.

[14:52] Will Lockhart: We were really getting excited about Go promotion and Go organizing. But to take the leap and start the film project with virtually no prior experience was not something we could do lightly.

[15:01] Will Lockhart: And I think the pro system really forced our hand in the best possible way because we just realized we're in the right place at the right time. This thing's happening now.

[15:10] Will Lockhart: We have these connections in the Go community.

[15:12] Will Lockhart: My brother and his best friend are two of the top players who are certain to compete, and we have access to that, you know, so it felt like the stars had aligned.

[15:22] Cole Pruitt: Yeah, I think to some degree. The statement by Keith Arnold in the film and kind of the hesitancy of the organizers, we also felt that too. But about the film,

[15:31] Cole Pruitt: can we really do this? Can we really pull off filming this and producing this documentary? Well, now's the time. So it's an offer we can't refuse because the pro system's happening.

[15:39] Cole Pruitt: So certainly that motivated me.

[15:42] Travis: Do you think this hesitance was also because of other concerns around,

[15:48] Travis: do we have the depth to really say somebody can be certified as a professional or am I barking up the wrong tree?

[15:56] Will Lockhart: I think for the wider Go community and the organizers, that was certainly a concern. You know, Keith and others were afraid, are people going to take this seriously? Are they strong enough?

[16:05] Will Lockhart: Is it going to be people like me competing? But in fact, I think at least in that first year, I think they pulled it off and we really did see essentially all of the strongest players on the continent ended up competing in that first tournament.

[16:17] Travis: Got it.

[16:18] Cole Pruitt: Great. Yeah. I think the hesitancy came from is there going to be a groundswell of support also from the community? Is there going to be buy in from the community behind this?

[16:25] Cole Pruitt: Because it's one thing to have a piece of paper that says, yeah, this is a professional, it's another for there to be kind of a,

[16:32] Cole Pruitt: as Terry Benson, another longtime Go organizer would say, kind of the dean of the American Go community. There needs to be a pyramid. You need to have a million 25 kyus and 100,000 5 kyus and 10,000 1-dans.

[16:45] Cole Pruitt: And you know, you can have professionals at the top of that pyramid, but otherwise it's top heavy.

[16:50] Travis: And I know Myungwan Kim, the 9 dan professional, was sort of a critical figure among others.

[16:56] Travis: I'm naive to this, so I'm not really aware, but to make that determination, and I'm sure there's a lot of conversations from the Korea Baduk Association to say, hey,

[17:04] Travis: we're going to sort of bless the certification process or recognize. It certainly says something.

[17:10] Will Lockhart: Yeah, I mean, we weren't in the room for those very first, you know, negotiations before it was announced. So Myungwan absolutely was the guy who made it happen. So he secured not only agreement from the Korea Baduk Association, but Tygem, the Go server actually sponsored the first tournament.

[17:27] Will Lockhart: So he got that sponsorship and basically I think this was sort of his vision. You know, he moved to the US to be a Go teacher, which is not an easy thing to do.

[17:36] Will Lockhart: I'm not sure what year he came, but he played in the US Open for a few years,

[17:41] Will Lockhart: was undefeated. I think he basically was like 36 and 0 in the US and then at that point, it was like, all right, clearly this guy is serious. This guy deserves our respect.

[17:50] Will Lockhart: And then when he says, all right, I've got an offer for you, people were like, I guess it's happening.

[17:58] Travis: So that's really.

[17:59] Will Lockhart: Yeah, he really orchestrated it. And it was a bold.

[18:02] Will Lockhart: And it was such a thrill to be part of that in our own way. And because this was all sort of this crazy experiment, I think the organizers of the tournament and the wider community at large were just extremely welcoming to us, and we had so much support from the community.

[18:18] Will Lockhart: Another thing that was really daunting about making a film is it's not cheap. As films go, this was a complete shoestring budget. But even still, film is not an inexpensive art form.

[18:29] Will Lockhart: There's a lot of equipment.

[18:30] Will Lockhart: We hired a cinematographer. Later, we hired an editor,

[18:34] Will Lockhart: so on and so forth. So to get it off the ground, we did a Kickstarter campaign in 2012, just after the pro system had been announced. And we got the nerve to do this.

[18:44] Will Lockhart: We launched a Kickstarter, and we got an enormous amount of support and people not just donating money, but also contacting us, saying, hey, like, if you come to Korea, you've got a place to stay.

[18:54] Will Lockhart: I can be your translator. You know, just all this volunteer effort that came really from the community,

[19:00] Will Lockhart: sharing this vision that this is an opportunity to hopefully make a splash and expose people to the game.

[19:07] Travis: Did you both find it difficult to find a path to interview, you know, Lee Sedol,

[19:13] Travis: kind of the Michael Jordan of Go, or Cho Hun-hyun? Folks like this?

[19:19] Cole Pruitt: It might be surprising, but I thought it was surprisingly easy to interview many of the top Asian pros for a couple of reasons. One is we were a bit of a novelty to show up with a small crew at the Korea Baduk Association and say, hey, we're Americans.

[19:36] Cole Pruitt: We'd like to talk to someone about Go. You know, is Lee Sedol available? Oh, yeah, yeah, he's right here. You know, no problem.

[19:42] Cole Pruitt: Go get him. At least it felt that way to me.

[19:45] Cole Pruitt: A lot of people in the Korean, Chinese, and Japanese Go communities opened really big doors for us.

[19:51] Cole Pruitt: And that was true again and again.

[19:54] Cole Pruitt: Sometimes I don't quite know how it was possible, but, yeah, it was easy for us to come in because people were opening doors for us to do these things.

[20:02] Will Lockhart: Are you familiar with the Shanghai Ing Foundation?

[20:05] Travis: No.

[20:05] Will Lockhart: Please tell me so. The Ing foundation is a philanthropic Go organization based in Shanghai.

[20:11] Will Lockhart: And back in the day, sort of before our time, they used to sponsor some AGA events and gave the AGA a whole bunch of equipment, including these ridiculous bowls that have this over engineered mechanism for counting how many stones are in the bowl.

[20:26] Will Lockhart: If you know, you know.

[20:28] Will Lockhart: But anyway, point is the part of the sort of snowball of enthusiasm that led us to starting the film. Even before the pro system,

[20:36] Will Lockhart: when we were organizing college tournaments,

[20:39] Will Lockhart: there was a woman named Min Shao who worked at Harvard University as like an administrator.

[20:45] Will Lockhart: Her brother actually was a high ranking officer of the Ng foundation and just someone with deep pockets and who is very well connected in the Go world in China.

[20:56] Will Lockhart: And so they actually started helping us put on events in Boston and the surrounding area for college Go players. And we actually got the opportunity to go to China for the very first time in 2011 on sort of like a college exchange trip for about 10 days.

[21:13] Will Lockhart: So this was a dozen or so American college players going and getting to see China and meeting Chinese college Go players and just sort of this like whirlwind Go exchange trip that was incredible and sort of came out of nowhere that really like jump started our,

[21:32] Will Lockhart: our enthusiasm about organizing tournaments and doing promotion. A year later when we started the film, we reached out to Min and her contacts again and said, hey, we have this project.

[21:42] Will Lockhart: We'd love to go back to China and collect footage for the film. What do you think?

[21:47] Will Lockhart: And they were willing to listen. So long story short, they basically opened the doors. You know, they helped us interview some Chinese professionals, made calls to, you know, a Go school in Beijing,

[22:01] Will Lockhart: where we got to visit and we got to go to the ING cup, which is one of the largest international Go tournaments that the ING foundation sponsors,

[22:09] Will Lockhart: and got some footage there. So that was like a huge part of getting access and also gaining confidence of like, hey, we might be able to do more than just tell the story of the American Go community.

[22:19] Will Lockhart: We might actually be able to dream a little bigger.

[22:22] Travis: So you interview Lee Sedol right now, a former professional,

[22:26] Travis: but again, he was really at the top of the game in the mid to late 2000s, I believe.

[22:32] Travis: And he has a quote in the documentary. He says, Go is the most difficult game ever devised by human beings. And then he goes on to say that compared to chess, Go is, quote, incomparably more subtle.

[22:45] Travis: As you both made this film and you went through what you said was hundreds of hours of footage over years,

[22:51] Travis: what do you think about these quotes resonate most with Westerners and with Americans?

[22:57] Cole Pruitt: Oh man,

[22:58] Cole Pruitt: sometimes it's hard. When I think back to when we were first sifting through some of these. This interview material, because you have to realize, when we first recorded it, we didn't know what was being said because we don't speak Japanese, Chinese or Korean.

[23:11] Cole Pruitt: So often we would be unpacking this quote because someone who was helping us translate this months later would get a transcript and say, hey, you should check this line out.

[23:21] Cole Pruitt: This is really cool. And we'd say, whoa, okay, we've got to get that, you know.

[23:25] Cole Pruitt: So the process of going through and sculpting what material was going to be in the final cut was really kind of putting puzzle pieces together over time. And to your question about western audiences, it doesn't matter the sport.

[23:40] Cole Pruitt: There's something awesome about seeing the best person in the world talk about how awesome it is. It could be squash,

[23:46] Cole Pruitt: it could be baseball. It can be a mind sport. To me, it still resonates. And I think to almost anyone, seeing the person who's the best in the world talk about how it's meaningful to them is profound.

[23:57] Will Lockhart: There's so many lines in the film from the top players saying that Go is really hard, you know, like, it's like too hard for them. Right. Like, sometimes I feel self conscious that we sort of hit that note even too much in the movie.

[24:09] Will Lockhart: But it's hard to resist having, you know, Lee Sedol or Yoo Changhyuk or these other top players talk about how they're overwhelmed by the depth of the game.

[24:18] Cole Pruitt: Right?

[24:19] Will Lockhart: And I think that's powerful and really interesting and speaks to just how mysterious the game is.

[24:26] Will Lockhart: The Lee Sedol interview again, we never expected to be able to get that. I think our translator was even more nervous than we were.

[24:34] Will Lockhart: So our translator in Korea was a really strong amateur player who is a Go teacher and go promoter in Korea.

[24:41] Will Lockhart: And we were out the association and sort of just filming the playing hall, Just kind of looking around and trying to get a sense of what was going on there and what might be interesting.

[24:53] Will Lockhart: And she saw him there just hanging out. We all saw him and we were like, oh, my God, there he is. What do you think? And we sort of were like, nudging our translator, and she was, like, really nervous, and she's like, do you think I can go up to him?

[25:04] Will Lockhart: We're like, go, go. You can do it. You know? And she, like, nervously approached him and asked, and he said, sure, let's meet after lunch. But these interviews, like Cole said, were very strange.

[25:15] Will Lockhart: First of all, of the many skills that we did not have when we started and hopefully can claim to have built by the End. Conducting an interview is a skill.

[25:23] Will Lockhart: It's not an easy matter. I mean, as the host of the podcast, you're probably finding there. There is an art to asking good questions, when to interrupt. And especially for the documentary, you know, it's a little more formal, so, you know, you don't want to talk over them and then have to worry about,

[25:39] Will Lockhart: oh, I ruined that moment because I was speaking and, you know, all these things of making eye contact and nodding but not saying, huh, huh, and then going back and being like, oh, ****.

[25:49] Will Lockhart: I like, spoke over the important part.

[25:51] Will Lockhart: So there's a lot to doing an interview. But it was even weirder to try to do an interview in another language because one of us would ask the question,

[25:59] Will Lockhart: then the translator would repeat the question, in this case in Korean.

[26:03] Will Lockhart: Then the interviewee, in this case, the top ranked player in the world would.

[26:07] Will Lockhart: Would start pontificating in a language that you don't understand.

[26:11] Will Lockhart: And you're like, trying to, like, nod as if you underst. You know what I mean? You're like, what do I do with my face and my hands? You know, and then they finally stop speaking and the translator quickly sort of whispers a summary of, you know, they can't repeat everything,

[26:25] Will Lockhart: but, you know, sort of quickly gives you a summary of what he said in, you know, 30 seconds. And then you have to be like,

[26:31] Will Lockhart: do you think we got it? Should we ask a follow up?

[26:36] Will Lockhart: You know, it was kind of. It was kind of an absurd situation,

[26:39] Will Lockhart: but we don't actually know what we have until much later when we get the transcript, so. But the Lee Sedol interview was fantastic. He's done a number of promotional events for a Western audience.

[26:49] Will Lockhart: As someone who was considered the number one player in the world for a long time,

[26:53] Will Lockhart: he cared a lot about promotion and making the game more international.

[26:58] Will Lockhart: Knowing more about that later on, I think makes sense why he was open to doing an interview with us then.

[27:04] Travis: You two did a great interview with Jay Madsen, and it was in an article back in December of 2022 with Go Magic

[27:11] Travis: And one thing you talk about is this concept we mentioned earlier about how with a movie, you said that when you make a movie, you're actually making three movies. The first is the movie you plan to make,

[27:22] Travis: the second is the movie you actually make,

[27:25] Travis: and then the third is the one you have when you put it all together.

[27:29] Travis: Tell me more about that.

[27:31] Will Lockhart: There's different kinds of documentaries, obviously.

[27:34] Will Lockhart: As we were following the tournament,

[27:36] Will Lockhart: we started to get more interested in character and not just telling the story. Of go. But in really following characters and being interested in, you know, what makes these guys tick and why are they so obsessed and what are their dreams and fears and all this.

[27:51] Will Lockhart: And, you know, it takes time for people to open up. Most people do not want to have a camera thrown in their face and follow their daily lives. On the other hand, people have a story that they want to share, and so it takes time.

[28:03] Will Lockhart: But. But I started to feel, as we learned more about these guys, you know, really seeing how they talk about it,

[28:11] Will Lockhart: it was clear that there was a real tension for all of them about caring so deeply about this thing and finding it so meaningful on the one hand,

[28:19] Will Lockhart: and then sort of blurring your eyes and being like, it's just a game, right? How could this be a life? You're literally just putting rocks on a piece of wood.

[28:27] Will Lockhart: It's not a job.

[28:29] Will Lockhart: You certainly couldn't make money doing that in America before. Is this pro system going to change that? People are skeptical who know just this question of what it means. And I think as we were putting the film together and trying to balance the reverent Asia scenes and the wacky American scenes,

[28:46] Will Lockhart: and I think there was sort of a magic that we sort of started to weave these things together and play around with how to tell these stories in parallel. And I think there was sort of a magic moment of realizing, like, oh, this contrast is really interesting, right?

[28:59] Will Lockhart: Like, we can lean into that. We can play up cutting from the reverence of this ancient board or like, you know, this board signed by Go Seigen, or everyone's talking in hushed tones and there's things behind panes of glass, and we can smash cut right into the beatboxing scene.

[29:15] Will Lockhart: You know what I mean? We started to sort of feel the magic. You know, we did test screenings. Our editor felt like, this isn't, like a problem we have to navigate.

[29:22] Will Lockhart: This is a strength. It's funny, it's fun, it's interesting. We should lean into the contrast. So that became kind of one of the guideposts of how to edit the film, was to do that back and forth and highlight the difference.

[29:34] Will Lockhart: It also is part of this paradox of, like, it's this deep, meaningful thing on the one hand, and then it's a silly joke and it's a game on the other.

[29:41] Travis: It then goes on later in the film to talk about this sort of contrasting of characters. So Andy sort of strikes you as the prodigy, as is Ben, but you get this real sense from the great footage you two are able to capture that Andy he can see the Matrix,

[30:02] Travis: right? He really is dialed in.

[30:04] Travis: And at the same time he really, at this point, as a lot of teenagers feel like, what am I doing? What is the goal? Where am I going towards? And he has this great scene with Michael Chen's character where Michael is really just asking the questions, what do you want to do?

[30:20] Travis: Can you work? Are you going to work?

[30:22] Travis: And you just see Andy, who early in the film is quite confident playing these games. And you can just see sort of the non verbals, he's really beating everyone.

[30:33] Travis: And then you see this moment where he's very much not that way. And I think in a very authentic

[30:38] Cole Pruitt: way,

[30:39] Cole Pruitt: something that I hope comes through in the film. And eventually I settled on the more footage we looked at and thought through.

[30:46] Cole Pruitt: There's a lot of intimacy and vulnerability that I think many of the characters express through Go that otherwise they might not express in their daily lives with, you know, the joking interactions that form kind of the banter in some of the film.

[31:02] Cole Pruitt: Like in that scene that you mention.

[31:04] Cole Pruitt: These are really difficult questions. And it's not clear that Go holds any answers to those questions. In fact, Go may just be a distraction for this. And yet it's also a way of like meeting with another person.

[31:16] Cole Pruitt: Something that two people both care very deeply about.

[31:19] Cole Pruitt: And finding community when it can be an isolating time for people as they go out of the world.

[31:26] Cole Pruitt: For me, a lot of these scenes really are charged with emotion. And there's a vulnerability that people are showing by talking about their fears. And that's reflected in how they play and how they view the game as well.

[31:39] Cole Pruitt: What's important to them about the game and what they like about it.

[31:43] Cole Pruitt: This gets back to Will's comment earlier about is this the most important thing in the world or is this just a game of putting rocks on a board?

[31:50] Cole Pruitt: There's that duality during the filming. We experienced that seeing the characters that we followed that that's how they felt. And they weren't sure about it either.

[31:59] Will Lockhart: The bulk of the footage was shot in a pretty short window of time. From about the summer of 2012 was when the pro tournament was held at the Go Congress. They were back to back.

[32:09] Will Lockhart: So that was like a two week blitz of just filming all day, every day for two weeks. And then we went to China and Korea the next fall. So just a few months span was maybe half of the footage or something like that.

[32:21] Will Lockhart: But then we kept filming on and off for another year, maybe year and a half, picking up some extra interviews and also just Keeping up with Ben and Andy and seeing what they were doing.

[32:29] Will Lockhart: And it wasn't until after more than a year, probably, that we got some of the most personal moments from each of them. I mean, I'd like to think they learned that they could trust us.

[32:40] Will Lockhart: Some of the interviews with Andy, that scene at the very end were some of the last things that we shot, actually. And I think in some ways that was when we realized I think we have what we need.

[32:50] Will Lockhart: I remember feeling this swelling feeling of like, I think we got it.

[32:54] Will Lockhart: When we started the film, I was like, 22.

[32:59] Will Lockhart: We were not that much older than these guys either. I had just finished college, wasn't sure what I wanted to do next. I was wrestling with some of these same questions.

[33:08] Will Lockhart: I just personally connected with that a lot.

[33:11] Will Lockhart: I got ambitious. I wanted to make a film that wasn't just the Go movie, but was also a piece of art that was about my experience or these characters experience or some of these more existential questions.

[33:23] Will Lockhart: That's what it became in the process. It's a strange process.

[33:27] Travis: You have a unique perspective because of your brother. You got some very intimate moments with him where he's talking about playing all night with Andy,

[33:35] Travis: getting fast food, skipping school.

[33:37] Travis: He talks about, quote, you develop too much of a relationship with something, especially if you don't suck at it, it becomes impossible to pull away.

[33:45] Travis: When you think about your brother, if I may ask,

[33:48] Travis: the path, the arc of his life, the unexpected turns from the medical side,

[33:53] Travis: do you find that his obsession really led to a place of belonging and fulfillment for him? Or was it a stepping stone to something else?

[34:04] Will Lockhart: I'll never know exactly how he felt about it, I suppose,

[34:08] Will Lockhart: just to be clear for the audience who may not know. So the film was released in 2017, 2018. But a few years after we were done filming, Ben contracted a rare form of cancer, and he actually passed away at the end of 2019.

[34:26] Will Lockhart: And it was just totally shocking and tragic.

[34:30] Will Lockhart: Given that that happened.

[34:32] Will Lockhart: It almost validates his determination to live the life that he wanted. You know, to not go to college, to not do what people around him were telling him he should do, and to live his values, which was like, he wanted to see this thing to the end and see what he could do.

[34:51] Will Lockhart: It's tragic to think what his life could have been if he was still alive. But on the other hand, for someone who lived to the age of 26, he lived, like, an incredibly full life.

[35:01] Will Lockhart: I really mean that. He lived in Europe for a year and studied Go in Hungary.

[35:06] Will Lockhart: He lived In Korea for a couple years.

[35:09] Will Lockhart: He knew everybody in the international Go community. He gave it his all. So it's like, what more can you ask?

[35:15] Travis: Could one of you talk through at a high level who Go Seigen is and how you were able to meet him and how you're able to film him?

[35:25] Cole Pruitt: So Go Seigen was a Japanese certified professional, originally of Chinese heritage, moved to Japan at the start of the 20th century and was widely regarded as one of the best Go players to have ever lived.

[35:39] Cole Pruitt: As James Davies says in the film,

[35:42] Cole Pruitt: reflecting back on Go Seigen's life, he changed the flow of the game.

[35:47] Cole Pruitt: His new ideas about the opening and his new style of play in the first half of the 20th century were really a watershed for the game.

[35:55] Cole Pruitt: He was widely regarded as the best player in the world for a long time.

[35:58] Cole Pruitt: So a Go saint, and also very long lived to the age of 100.

[36:04] Cole Pruitt: When we traveled in 2013 to film in Japan, we knew we had to film in Japan to really capture the three worlds of Go in East Asia. We were in contact with Michael Redmond, an American,

[36:17] Cole Pruitt: American born, Japanese certified professional living in Japan, 9 dan professional,

[36:22] Cole Pruitt: who had contacts with Go Seigen and Go Seigen's family. And Michael prompted us, out of the blue,

[36:29] Cole Pruitt: while you're here,

[36:30] Cole Pruitt: do you want to try to meet Go Seigen?

[36:32] Cole Pruitt: I mean, that was a shock certainly to me. And Michael facilitated us being able to find a time to go meet with him. And we didn't quite know what to expect in advance because we didn't know the state of his health.

[36:44] Cole Pruitt: We didn't know if he'd be responsive or super sharp. It so happened that Ben could join us for that as well, which was not originally part of the plan.

[36:54] Cole Pruitt: And so going into that, I remember Will and I spent a couple of sleepless nights trying to figure out, what do you ask the greatest Go player of the 20th century?

[37:03] Will Lockhart: And we were just giddy. I mean, this is again, like Cole said, one of those things where we never in our wildest dreams, you know, we had a few contacts in Japan.

[37:10] Will Lockhart: We had gotten in touch with James Davies, Michael Redmond, Tom Urasoe from the Nihon Ki-in,

[37:15] Will Lockhart: but we never would have dreamed of Go Seigen. And then Michael Redmond just in an email, you know, we're having an email exchange about when are we coming and where should, you know, where should we meet and stuff.

[37:25] Will Lockhart: And he just throws it, like, just casually like, oh, yeah, you should. What about Go Seigen? You should probably get him in there too, right? It was like one of the most nerve wracking moments of the whole film saga was refreshing our email, you know, every five seconds to see,

[37:38] Will Lockhart: like, you know, because he's like, oh, you know, I'll make some calls, I can't promise, you know, and we're like, oh my God, is it going to happen?

[37:43] Will Lockhart: So Ben and his girlfriend at the time, you know, they were living in Korea, in Seoul, and they hopped over to Tokyo and met us for a few days.

[37:51] Will Lockhart: Not originally just for that. I think we had planned to do that before we ever found out about the Go Seigen trip. He was just going to come along and, you know, we were going to do another interview with Ben, check in on how his life in Korea is going.

[38:03] Will Lockhart: So, you know, he wanted to take a trip to Japan and be on vacation for a few days and just come with us to see the Nihon Ki-in and so forth.

[38:10] Will Lockhart: It wasn't until much later that we realized how following Ben through the story, we could really frame the Go Seigen interview as following Ben to meet Go Seigen rather than just getting to interview Go Seigen.

[38:21] Will Lockhart: And we're so lucky that it worked out that way because to me, that's the climax of the movie and is like the meeting of the young person searching for answers, you know, meeting the wise old sage.

[38:31] Will Lockhart: And we were so lucky that it worked out that way.

[38:34] Travis: This is a little bit like,

[38:36] Travis: let's say you're Christian and somebody's like, hey, you might be able to meet Jesus Christ.

[38:42] Travis: I mean, that's literally what it is.

[38:45] Travis: You go there, you can see Ben's face as this is all happening. He's just like.

[38:50] Travis: He looks like he's in Nirvana.

[38:52] Travis: It's an incredibly powerful part of the film that I think is just so enjoyable.

[38:58] Cole Pruitt: Just as Will mentioned that there's kind of this contrast between a very brash American teenage energy and a more,

[39:07] Devin Fraze: you

[39:07] Cole Pruitt: know, a thousand years of Asian history in Go. That appears really in that scene, in that it begins with a birthday party, which we didn't expect at first, but that was the occasion.

[39:18] Cole Pruitt: And so singing Happy Birthday in English in front of a strawberry cake to, in this case, Jesus Christ, Go.

[39:25] Cole Pruitt: Yeah, it's a surreal thing. And I think that really encapsulates a lot of what drove us about the cultural kind of overlap. That was a little microcosm of that.

[39:33] Will Lockhart: It was so surreal, though. So surreal. So weird.

[39:37] Will Lockhart: You know, at first he was not very lucid when he first.

[39:41] Will Lockhart: His caretaker sort of wheels him out into the. Into the living room.

[39:46] Will Lockhart: You can't Always tell, and especially with him not speaking English. But he seems a little bit foggy, you know, not that responsive.

[39:53] Will Lockhart: But the amazing thing was then when they put him in front of the Go board and started reviewing some of his old games and he lit up. You could really see it's sort of like they talk about with people who, you know, used to play piano or have this relationship with some art form or an instrument or something.

[40:09] Will Lockhart: The brain will kind of re engage. There's sort of this rush of memories, and it kind of gets them more awake and more alive when they're in that familiar setting, you know, and you can totally see that.

[40:20] Will Lockhart: I think it comes through in the scene to some extent, but in person, it was even more dramatic and more obvious the way he sort of came to in front of the Go board, which is just very moving.

[40:30] Travis: This is a man who used to sit in front of a board for overnight. Like, literally just sit there looking and figuring out a million different moves, Right? So there is this incredible level of physicality to it, all the way to being 99 years old.

[40:45] Travis: That's incredible.

[40:47] Travis: Okay, I would love to do a little lightning round. Give me the highest moment and the lowest moment of the project.

[40:54] Will Lockhart: That's a good question.

[40:55] Will Lockhart: There were so many high moments. I'd say one which maybe is surprising, but early on in the project,

[41:04] Will Lockhart: those first couple months when things were just getting off the ground was just some of the most exhilarating times of my life.

[41:13] Will Lockhart: All the energy is behind you and all the possibilities are in front of you. And it's like the Pro System just launched and we just hired a cameraman,

[41:21] Will Lockhart: and we're flying out to LA for the Cotsen Open, which was the first qualifier for the US Pro System. You know, we have this ragtag team that we just threw together.

[41:30] Will Lockhart: We're here. There's the first qualifier. You know, we meet Curtis Tang. We're following him. There's all this energy. And then Myungwan says, oh, by the way, Cho Hun-hyun is here.

[41:40] Will Lockhart: He's ready for his interview.

[41:43] Will Lockhart: And so he was actually one of the first pros we ever interviewed. And that was like the moment when it was like, wow, we're on cloud nine. Like, this is crazy.

[41:51] Will Lockhart: We're really doing this. You know what I mean?

[41:53] Will Lockhart: For low points, I'll give you sort of a joke answer and a real answer. So the joke answer is when we were in the middle of Western China and our cinematographer got food poisoning and was vomiting for three days in, like, a disgusting hotel room in the Middle of nowhere.

[42:08] Will Lockhart: Luckily, we didn't have anything super important.

[42:10] Will Lockhart: Somehow he managed to find the least bad time to get food poisoning and be deathly ill. But it got to a point where we were starting to worry, like, is this something where we're gonna have to, like, take him to the hospital or something?

[42:21] Will Lockhart: We don't know anyone. We barely know where we are. Luckily, it passed and he was fine, but that was a rough one. And then the real low point, I think, was just somewhere in the endless stretch of the editing process.

[42:34] Will Lockhart: I don't really have, like, a specific rock bottom moment exactly, but it was so arduous, and there were just so many times when it's like, it's just not working yet.

[42:43] Will Lockhart: You know what I mean? You're trying everything. You're trying to put things together.

[42:46] Will Lockhart: We're over budget. We're behind schedule, and editing was just really, really hard.

[42:51] Will Lockhart: There were times when we just felt stuck and we were running out of money, and doubt was creeping in about,

[42:58] Will Lockhart: are we going to be able to finish this?

[43:00] Cole Pruitt: I'll give you a very quick high point in our Lee Sedol interview.

[43:05] Cole Pruitt: There were a few folks outside the room at the Korea Baduk Association who were just chatting,

[43:11] Cole Pruitt: adding a little bit of noise to the background, kind of interfering with the interview.

[43:14] Cole Pruitt: I ran out of the room to try to. Again, I don't speak Korean, but to try to address the situation.

[43:20] Cole Pruitt: Cho Hun-hyun, who we had interviewed a few months before at the Cotsen Open,

[43:24] Cole Pruitt: saw us, recognized us, and said, I got you, and told the guys, hey, quiet down. They're interviewing Lee Sedol there,

[43:31] Cole Pruitt: gave us a thumbs up. It was like, all right, When Cho Hun-hyun is running point for you, you can't go wrong.

[43:37] Cole Pruitt: That was a high point,

[43:38] Cole Pruitt: one low point, which I'll admit now, for the first time in our interview with the Black Mountain Go Congress and getting set up.

[43:45] Cole Pruitt: At one point, I was setting up Colin, our cinematographer's camera, on a tripod, and I, like, dropped it or dinged it or something. And I was so mortified. I was gonna break a lens, like $10, 000, completely screw everything up.

[44:00] Cole Pruitt: It was totally fine, but I almost wet my pants. It was terrible feeling.

[44:08] Travis: If you could do the project over again and you had the chance to change one thing, what would it be?

[44:14] Will Lockhart: I watched the film for the first time in a long time.

[44:17] Will Lockhart: I hadn't seen it since Ben died. I hadn't seen it just in a long time.

[44:21] Will Lockhart: And it was really nice. It was nice to see it again with more distance, with less baggage. With less hanging over me about all the little decisions we made and all the things I might regret or might not.

[44:33] Will Lockhart: So I was really happy with it, seeing it again. But I would say the thing that sort of like, haunted me the most in general about how the film turned out was just being unsure if the tone becomes sort of too serious too soon.

[44:48] Will Lockhart: We touch on these sort of existential questions and ideas and they use music and all these techniques to sort of emphasize that I always want to make sure that people get the feeling that in addition to all of that and the intense competition and the obsession and the agony of losing and all this stuff that Ben and Andy just loved Go.

[45:08] Will Lockhart: They loved to play Go. They would laugh,

[45:11] Will Lockhart: they were best friends. And this was also just a source of great joy, you know what I mean? And it was a source of great joy for millions of people.

[45:19] Will Lockhart: Anytime there was a piece of feedback that was of the effect that like, wow, it was more serious than I expected or more heavy,

[45:26] Will Lockhart: that always sort of made me self conscious about that issue. And I'm not saying I regret it, but it was just something that always was something I worried about a lot.

[45:33] Will Lockhart: It was like, are we striking that balance, right, of like, the seriousness of competition and the sort of existential dread and these questions about mortality and what are you going to do with your life and all this stuff?

[45:44] Will Lockhart: Is that balanced enough with just this game is so fun and it's so beautiful and you guys should play it. I want it to be a movie that people watch and then, like, want to go play and are not just like, Jesus Christ.

[45:54] Will Lockhart: That's. It's horrible. It's so intense.

[45:57] Will Lockhart: I want it to be also, like, inspiring and have a levity to it too.

[46:02] Cole Pruitt: I think we spent maybe a little too much time on the nuts and bolts of go. You know, how does Go work exactly? How does the scoring or the ranking work?

[46:09] Cole Pruitt: That stuff is important to give people a sense of the world. But I want more crazy go. I want more people having fun at the Go Congress.

[46:17] Cole Pruitt: I want more people having fun in Asia playing Go.

[46:20] Cole Pruitt: I want more of that energy that Will talks about.

[46:23] Cole Pruitt: And I think people can go and learn exactly what the ko rule means or what is an amateur 6 dan.

[46:31] Cole Pruitt: I think we were really proud at the time of getting those elements right. We felt like people picked it up. But like Will says, I want people to have fun watching and then have fun playing.

[46:41] Travis: Cool.

[46:41] Travis: Will, this has been really a wonderful experience. So thank you both for coming on.

[46:47] Will Lockhart: Absolutely.

[46:47] Cole Pruitt: Thanks for hosting. Had a great time.

Tournament Time Controls with Devin Fraze

[47:02] Travis: We're back with Go organizer Devin Fraze as he talks about time settings in tournaments and different effects that you have when you use different time settings.

[47:10] Travis: Let's take a listen.

[47:14] Travis: The next question in the tournament setting is you're trying to make it as fun as possible. How do you think about time settings? I know that the AGA has come out and said, hey, we're going to try to do the Fischer time setting more where you start with a small amount of main time and every time you play a move,

[47:29] Travis: some seconds are added. But then I see for like some of the more serious tournaments like the Pro Qualifier, that they did not use that they did the byo-yomi where you have a big main time and then you have those resetting shorter periods.

[47:41] Travis: How do you think about that?

[47:43] Devin Fraze: Yeah, well, I'll disclose my bias here. I was one of the main proponents of the AGA pushing for Fischer. But of course,

[47:51] Devin Fraze: Secrets out,

[47:53] Devin Fraze: this is something that they chose on their own. But it's something that I'd already started to transition to before and it's something we see in professional tournaments more now. Actually,

[48:00] Devin Fraze: even in Japan, Korea, China, if you watch Baduk TV, they're using Fischer. If you go to any European tournaments, they're all using Fischer.

[48:08] Devin Fraze: And the benefits are clear on multiple fronts. One of them is Fischer. Time setting is much more predictable in regards to the length of a game,

[48:15] Devin Fraze: which from an organizer's perspective is huge.

[48:19] Devin Fraze: If you imagine again, you're not doing arena style tournament, you're doing a round based tournament, which is perfectly fine. And I run those and they're great.

[48:26] Devin Fraze: Then the round based tournaments, if somebody, one person's game is dragging on, the whole tournament stops and we're all watching, we're all waiting and it's going to cause all sorts of issues with people feeling rushed and pairing and stuff like that.

[48:40] Devin Fraze: So byo-yomi permits you to spend your whole main time playing 10 moves and then you could spend the next 200 moves in 30-second byo-yomi where you wait 29 seconds and then play your move and that will stretch a very,

[48:53] Devin Fraze: very long time. Of course that's a horrible example where it just goes egregiously long. But the reality is some of those do go very long.

[49:02] Devin Fraze: Now when I switched to Fischer, I ran a tournament in New York. They were very kind and they invited me to run a tournament for the Gotham Go group. And some of the strong players were like mad at me.

[49:10] Devin Fraze: They're like, hey, listen,

[49:11] Devin Fraze: byo-yomi is fine. Like, why are you doing this? Like, what do you want to Do. I sat down, I showed them a math. I created a physical chart. This chart allows people to accurately predict.

[49:19] Devin Fraze: I said, here's the chart, here's the math. It's based on like 2 million OGS games. I can with high confidence tell you that this tournament will have exactly about two hour rounds if you use these time settings.

[49:30] Devin Fraze: And he's like, there's no way, like it's not going to happen. That exact player literally was the last 1 dan playing every single time, every single round, and it took exactly two plus or minus three minutes.

[49:40] Devin Fraze: I timed this just to prove to him and you know, he was kind of like, okay, fine, you know, so it's new to players and so I understand the skepticism.

[49:47] Devin Fraze: And so you have to be confident as an organizer. Say you know, you know why you're doing it, be able to explain yourself well,

[49:53] Devin Fraze: and then, yeah, and then just do it and it really will serve you better. So the one thing that the strong players don't like about it is they, they like maximum thinking time.

[50:01] Devin Fraze: So that's why they prefer byo-yomi. And if you have something at the US Open where you have unlimited time for a round, you can use byo-yomi and just take all the time in the world.

[50:10] Devin Fraze: And that's fine. It's not hurting anybody else by doing that.

[50:13] Devin Fraze: The reason why they were doing it in the Congress, now the U. S. go Congress, is because we're trying to normalize Fischer and get into people's minds. This is something we should recommend using as a standard.

[50:23] Devin Fraze: Yeah, so I think Fischer is fun.

[50:25] Devin Fraze: One thing I'll say too, for, you know, reasons to like Fischer as a player, imagine trying to read out a sequence. Well, you can't read it all the way out, but you don't want to play your byo-yomi move immediately.

[50:34] Devin Fraze: You want to spend as much time as you can thinking about it. But Fischer, what's nice is let's say you get 20 seconds per move. Well, you just quickly play out the moves that are obvious.

[50:42] Devin Fraze: You just gained, you know, a minute or two minutes now you can read when it matters. You don't have to wait till you can get to the, you know, trying to read super deep and then just play like a time tesuji or whatever.

[50:54] Devin Fraze: You can play quickly when it doesn't matter and then think deeply when it does. It's a very nice balance. Once you learn how to play with it from a broadcast perspective,

[51:02] Devin Fraze: it's so much better. And this is why Baduk TV, you know, uses it. Imagine you're watching a game and someone's in atari and they're sitting there for 28 seconds in atari because those pros

[51:13] Travis: are trained with byo-yomi. You use every second and then you get to the end because you can just hold that move you know you're going to do and spend the rest of the time.

[51:22] Travis: So it becomes very boring is what you're saying.

[51:25] Devin Fraze: Exactly. So for the viewer, a very bad experience. So, yeah, I think Fischer just makes the most sense. It's also called incremental time.

[51:33] Devin Fraze: So obviously Fischer wasn't necessarily created by Bobby Fischer, but Bobby Fischer popularized it.

[51:38] Travis: Popularized it.

[51:38] Devin Fraze: And so it's kind of like the difference between a brand name of like Kleenex and tissue.

[51:41] Will Lockhart: Yeah, I got it.

[51:42] Devin Fraze: You could also call it incremental time, and it's worth knowing about that. Or bonus time. There's also some other fun and weird time settings, like Bronstein Time.

[51:50] Devin Fraze: I won't dive into it, but it's always worth considering experimenting with new things, especially if you're doing some special tournaments. Right. Like you can try different time setting.

[51:58] Devin Fraze: One that definitely is hardcore for a tournament, unless it's just for fun, is hourglass time. You know where.

[52:05] Travis: I'm so glad you're bringing this up.

[52:06] Travis: Yes.

[52:07] Travis: Please tell us how it works.

[52:08] Devin Fraze: For hourglass time settings, if you have a minute for each players and you think for 10 seconds, well, now you have 50 seconds and your opponent has a minute and 10 seconds.

[52:18] Devin Fraze: So.

[52:19] Travis: So cool.

[52:20] Devin Fraze: It's very cool, very fun, novel way to play. You could of course get a physical sand timer and flip it. That's obviously very fun.

[52:27] Devin Fraze: Although it's hard to, of course, like, you know, oh, how much sand was left in there? Like, you know, you can try to get away with a flip, you know, when it's run out or something.

[52:34] Devin Fraze: But of course, you could also use different apps. Not to play myself endlessly, but I created a go timer as well. It is integrated directly into the tournament app, but you can also just visit it directly.

[52:44] Devin Fraze: app.baduk.club/timer. I haven't added Canadian. I was going to add Canadian time and actually recently I was playing with Ben Mantle and he's like, add that dirty time setting.

[52:54] Devin Fraze: Yeah, he's 5 dan or 6 dan. Even he knows what he's talking about. The nice thing about Canadian time is if you have a physical clock that only has the ability to control the hour and minute hand,

[53:07] Devin Fraze: being able to do any sort of additional time or overtime, like with Fischer is impossible. So what you need to do is you need to do Canadian. Then when you run out of stones Pull out of your bowl, 20, 25, whatever, stones, and you turn your clock back, 10,

[53:20] Devin Fraze: 15, 20 minutes,

[53:22] Devin Fraze: and you play from there. That's where it became necessity and kind of probably how it was invented.

[53:28] Devin Fraze: But I think with a lot of modern tech, it's just really not needed. And it has some of the benefits of Fischer and that you could play a bunch of moves quickly and then not worry about it.

[53:36] Devin Fraze: There's no loss of it, but definitely, I don't recommend it for anyone.

[53:40] Travis: Two last things I wanted to get your thoughts on. One is it's anecdotal, but it sounded like as Fischer time was being adopted in the Korean professional system and stuff like this, I felt like all of a sudden online I was starting.

[53:54] Travis: Everybody say, hey, check out this pro accidentally timing out because they're not hitting, like the button correctly, and things like this. Now, that could be completely false and like, it hasn't been happening.

[54:05] Travis: But have you seen people struggling with the actual physicality of doing it versus the byo-yomi?

[54:11] Devin Fraze: Luckily, the physicality for certain clocks, or most clocks are not a problem. Most people know how to hit the clock. One of the things that's not clear for some clocks, but not the clocks we sell, ours are very clear,

[54:22] Devin Fraze: is you don't know when it's going to flag. So you don't realize it's flagging on 0 or 1 or it does flag. You've run out of time, essentially. And it doesn't clearly indicate it because when you hit the clock, it does start counting again.

[54:35] Devin Fraze: And that's very confusing for players. So it's something to watch out for. If you're looking to buy a clock, you don't have to buy ours. You can buy anywhere, but you want to be careful that it's not going to be confusing to players after the time flags.

[54:44] Devin Fraze: Another thing I'll say is, in my tournaments, no matter how many times I explain we're doing Fischer,

[54:51] Devin Fraze: when it reaches zero, you lose.

[54:53] Devin Fraze: You get 10 seconds per play, you know, or 20 seconds per play so, you know, there's no overtime.

[54:59] Devin Fraze: The first round, I'll have one or two people that run out of time. They're, oh, I thought there was overtime. And it's painful. I was like, man, it was on the website.

[55:07] Devin Fraze: It's in the app. I told you, I announced it. Every other player did it. Right?

[55:12] Travis: Some things are just so deeply ingrained. I'm sure it's muscle memory on it.

[55:16] Devin Fraze: Yeah, I don't blame them, per se. And I think all Go players are very used to making A very painful mistake and losing because of it and then never forgetting again.

[55:24] Devin Fraze: So in some ways you never forget.

[55:27] Travis: So in some ways you're helping them out. Devin as the TD, you're helping them.

Season Two Takeaways

[55:40] Travis: It's time for season two takeaways. I can't believe we've gotten to the end of the season.

[55:46] Travis: I'm going to go ahead and start telling you what those are, in no particular order.

[55:50] Travis: First,

[55:51] Travis: tournaments, Tournaments, tournaments. So if you got anything from this season, we should all be playing in tournaments. We should be trying to organize tournaments if we're feeling up to the challenge.

[56:01] Travis: And we should be watching them too.

[56:04] Travis: Devin was really helpful with talking about this. Albert Yen was helping us understand how they work and we were also hearing from BenKyo about the joys of playing in them.

[56:14] Travis: So number two,

[56:16] Travis: you don't need to be a high level dan player with years of experience to teach the game or to spread the word about it. Just know your limits.

[56:25] Travis: And that was something that Jonathan Hop spoke to us about as he wrote his book and as he was sort of in his main period of playing Go.

[56:35] Travis: Number three,

[56:36] Travis: burnout is real.

[56:39] Travis: And as BenKyo mentioned, it's really helpful to take breaks.

[56:43] Travis: This is true. I've heard this with what's called the pomodoro technique. My wife used a lot when she was doing her dissertation for her PhD. She would do a certain amount of time on and then a little bit of a break and again a little more time on.

[56:56] Travis: It really makes a difference for our productivity because we are just not built to work for hours on end. We need little breaks.

[57:04] Travis: Number four, it's interesting how I've noticed that with a few of our guests, but also with others I've seen online how Go can become this way to escape some of the things we don't love about the real world and I think in a positive way.

[57:20] Travis: And then sometimes there are these things that we've gone through and then once we're in a good place we can kind of get back to the real world.

[57:28] Travis: Jonathan Hop, just talking about or alluding to some of his experiences and how Go was really helpful for him during that period,

[57:35] Travis: was great to see how the game can provide that support and even maybe that community.

[57:41] Travis: Number five,

[57:42] Travis: when you are playing Go and you're trying to get better,

[57:45] Travis: there was a lot of feedback this season about doing what is most enjoyable to you. So Michael Chen was saying,

[57:51] Travis: memorize some of the harder life and death. Maybe that works for you.

[57:55] Travis: You had the opposite with former Korean Professional Hajin Lee, who loves life and death like that is her jam. So even though Michael Chen hates it, she loves it.

[58:05] Travis: And then BenKyo is really into joseki because he thinks that that really helps you learn about how things work in the corners within that point. It's also better to play when you're not fully ready and fully focused than to not play at all.

[58:21] Travis: Michael Chen touched on that, and I think that's a really good point that I know I'm going to personally try to do more.

[58:27] Travis: And bringing a Go board to a third date could help your chances.

[58:32] Travis: I love how Michael Chen did that.

[58:35] Travis: Number six,

[58:36] Travis: Albert Yen was talking about. When you play Go,

[58:40] Travis: it is really this conversation without words, which we're all very familiar with.

[58:45] Travis: But it finally clicked in my brain that when you're playing that game,

[58:51] Travis: you're really doing this challenging and testing of each other's ideas about what groups are connected,

[58:57] Travis: what groups are not connected, or what is more efficient.

[59:00] Travis: And there's a agreeing and disagreeing that goes on.

[59:04] Travis: It actually reminds me of my work and with financial planning and with investments and markets,

[59:11] Travis: whenever somebody is selling an investment or buying an investment,

[59:14] Travis: they're making an opinion about what they think is going to happen to that investment.

[59:19] Travis: And for every buyer, there's a seller. So somebody's disagreeing with you innately when you do that.

[59:26] Travis: And in Go on the board,

[59:28] Travis: you can see this agreeing or disagreeing based on what one player does and if the other player follows it or agrees with it.

[59:38] Travis: Number seven. There was some really interesting cultural stuff about Go,

[59:42] Travis: how it's perceived in other cultures. We talked to Professor Marc Moskowitz about the effects of Go in Chinese culture,

[59:52] Travis: how it might affect senses of gender or masculinity or making it in the world.

[59:57] Travis: We talked with Professor Chihyung Nam about how Go sort of came up in history and particularly went through the different kingdoms of Korea.

Closing Reflection

[01:00:08] Travis: The last thing I want to say about the season is I was going through and editing all of these episodes,

[01:00:15] Travis: and I'm in my kitchen, I have

[01:00:18] Travis: my headphones on, my wife is away or in the other room or something, and I'm just taking dishes out of the dishwasher, I'm cleaning the counter, all these sorts of things.

[01:00:27] Travis: And I'm listening to one of my edits, and there was a moment where it felt so a light bulb went

[01:00:34] Travis: off and I was like, wow, this

[01:00:36] Travis: is exactly what I wanted.

[01:00:38] Travis: This is the kind of content I

[01:00:40] Travis: want to be able to listen to while I'm doing these things.

[01:00:43] Travis: And it's not so in depth that

[01:00:45] Travis: I need to stop what I'm doing, but it's also interesting enough and you get to learn about the Go world. So that was just a really satisfying moment for me and the reason why I do this to begin with.

[01:00:56] Travis: So I hope some of you felt some small piece of that as well when you are going through your day and you're listening to this.

[01:01:04] Travis: Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for listening and talk to you next time.

[01:01:21] Unknown Speaker: Sam.