All Things Go Podcast

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Timestamps correspond to the published episode.

C. Thi Nguyen: Games as the Art of Agency

[00:21] Travis: We are going to begin with the episode’s main interview.

[00:35] Travis: And I found this person fascinating. He is a professor and he describes himself as a philosopher in the area of gaming, among other things. And so he has some really interesting thoughts.

[00:47] Travis: He came out with a book a few years back, and so I reached out to him and he was willing to have a conversation. And he is also a philosopher, former Go player.

[00:56] Travis: So it really was a fun conversation and we will jump right into it. So without further ado,

[01:03] Travis: C. Thi Nguyen.

[01:08] Travis: C. Thi Nguyen, thank you so much for being here.

[01:10] C. Thi Nguyen: Thank you, man.

[01:11] Travis: Let me just start with your bio and your background a little bit because it’s really interesting.

[01:15] Travis: So you’re an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, and your research focuses on trust,

[01:21] Travis: art, games and communities.

[01:24] Travis: And you’re interested in the ways that social structures and technologies shape how we think and what we value. So you have your PhD from UCLA,

[01:34] Travis: but at one point you were a food critic. You know, the big thing that we’re going to really spend our time on for this conversation is about your book,

[01:42] Travis: The main subject of our conversation is your book Games: Agency as Art.

[01:51] C. Thi Nguyen: Actually, it was the other way around. I was already in a philosophy graduate program at ucla.

[01:56] Travis: Got it.

[01:57] C. Thi Nguyen: And then I got a job at the LA Times doing food criticism because I was drunk, posting online food reviews,

[02:03] C. Thi Nguyen: and the LA Times food editor liked it. But, I mean, I was already on the philosophy track. The weird question is how I got from, like, mainstream philosophy to doing philosophy of games.

[02:12] C. Thi Nguyen: So.

[02:13] Travis: And then my understanding is also that you were.

[02:15] Travis: When we first connected, you said you had once been a Go player and reached approximately 7-kyu.

[02:23] Travis: Correct?

[02:24] C. Thi Nguyen: Yep. I was just starting to feel like I wasn’t completely incompetent.

[02:27] C. Thi Nguyen: Yeah, I think I see the full beauty of the game. A little. Just little shreds. And then I had to stop.

[02:33] Travis: Yes,

[02:33] Travis: that can make a lot of sense.

[02:35] Travis: Let’s actually get into your book.

[02:38] Travis: You’re referencing a philosopher named Bernard Suits.

[02:42] Travis: He’s quoted as saying this line that I think speaks to a lot of us, particularly as Go players. He says that playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

[02:53] Travis: And you quote this in your book when you’re describing the whole point of a game.

[02:57] Travis: Right.

[02:58] Travis: It’s not to accomplish something as efficiently as possible, but within inefficient constraints and rules that are provided by a game designer. So in that context,

[03:09] Travis: how do you think about the game of Go? Which is really interesting because as you know, in the game of Go,

[03:14] Travis: you’re still following these constraints and I think it follows that rule. But you’re trying to be as efficient as possible. Right. You want to spread these stones out, cover territory, but if you’re too over concentrated, you’re missing out.

[03:26] C. Thi Nguyen: I think this is the core weirdness of Bernard. So Bernard Suits the book. The Grasshopper is like the book that showed me the way to think about games.

[03:35] C. Thi Nguyen: And the thing that you’re identifying in Go is not unique to Go. I think it’s a general feature of games,

[03:39] C. Thi Nguyen: which is the weirdness of games is we accept some inefficiencies and then we act as efficiently as possible inside those inefficiencies. Right. So I’m a rock climber first. I accept some inefficiencies.

[03:52] C. Thi Nguyen: I’m not going to use a rope, right? I mean, I’m not going to use a rope to ascend, I’m not going to use a helicopter, I’m not going to use stairs.

[03:59] C. Thi Nguyen: I’m just going to use my hands and feet to climb the rock.

[04:02] C. Thi Nguyen: Once I’ve accepted those inefficiencies, I act as efficiently as possible. I think an easier way to put it is like a marathon. The way that suits puts it. One way to think about it is what’s special about a game is that the goal is partially constituted by its relationship to constraints.

[04:19] C. Thi Nguyen: The goal is not truly the goal unless you reach it through the game’s constraints. In Suits’s terminology, every game has a lusory goal and a prelusory goal.

[04:29] C. Thi Nguyen: The prelusory goal is the state of affairs you are trying to reach, described without reference to the constraints.

[04:37] C. Thi Nguyen: The prelusory goal of a marathon is crossing a particular point in space; in basketball, it is moving the ball through the hoop.

[04:47] C. Thi Nguyen: But then you have to add certain constraints to make it the real game goal. So the real game goal in basketball is making a basket.

[04:54] C. Thi Nguyen: But notice that if you move the ball through the net by using a step ladder,

[04:59] C. Thi Nguyen: you’ve moved the ball through the net but you haven’t made a basket. Right. Similarly, if you move across this point in space where the finish line is in a marathon, you haven’t crossed the finish line.

[05:10] C. Thi Nguyen: If you used like an uber Or a bicycle. Right.

[05:14] C. Thi Nguyen: So doing something, but doing it under constraints. So the constraints define the action and define the goal.

[05:21] C. Thi Nguyen: Suits’s idea is that games ask us to accept inefficiencies that create the activity and its goal, and then to act as efficiently as possible within those constraints.

[05:33] C. Thi Nguyen: So we’re trying to be efficient locally inside the game,

[05:36] C. Thi Nguyen: but, you know, we’re not being maximally efficient outside the game galactically, because if you wanted to be efficient about moving through space, you would use a car. You wouldn’t run.

[05:46] Travis: Right.

[05:48] C. Thi Nguyen: One way to put it is basically that for Suits,

[05:51] C. Thi Nguyen: because the whole game is built around an inefficiency that reveals to us that the point isn’t just the simple outcome.

[05:59] C. Thi Nguyen: The point is our being involved in the skilled activity, us actually exercising a specific sculpted skill, being involved in the effort and the struggle itself. That’s where the value comes in.

[06:12] C. Thi Nguyen: One way to put it is, I think that what Suits theory reveals is, is that the value of games in most cases, or in many cases is in the process, not the outcome, because if it was just the outcome, you would act maximally efficiently.

[06:24] Travis: And then you talk about this concept, which is striving play versus achieving play.

[06:30] C. Thi Nguyen: So striving play and achievement play are actually what I added to Suits.

[06:34] C. Thi Nguyen: What Suits reveals is that there are two motivations for play.

[06:38] C. Thi Nguyen: So achievement play is playing because you actually value winning.

[06:42] C. Thi Nguyen: And striving play is playing because you want the struggle.

[06:47] C. Thi Nguyen: And when you’re a striving player, you get yourself to want to win temporarily, but it’s not really what you care about. It’s not the center of what you’re doing.

[06:56] C. Thi Nguyen: So one of my arguments for striving play in my book is that. So I play a lot of board games with my wife.

[07:03] C. Thi Nguyen: And one of the interesting things about us is we have very different skill sets. So she is a chemist. So she’s incredibly good at geometrical reasoning. So any board game that’s tested at all, she will destroy me.

[07:15] C. Thi Nguyen: I am very good at social deceit and incentive manipulation. So if a game is about social deceit and incentive manipulation, I will destroy her.

[07:23] C. Thi Nguyen: And then once in a while, we’ll find a game where we’re perfectly balanced and it’ll be beautiful. And then at night, I’ll find an online strategy guide.

[07:32] C. Thi Nguyen: Here’s the interesting thing. She’ll never read a strategy guide. And so I’m faced with this choice. If I read the strategy guide, I’ll start winning.

[07:39] Travis: But.

[07:39] C. Thi Nguyen: But the game will turn boring and Most of the time I don’t read the strategy guide, right? What I do is I try to keep my level at like the right level for this juicy, delicious struggle.

[07:50] C. Thi Nguyen: This is, I think the paradox of striving play.

[07:53] C. Thi Nguyen: Go is going to be a weird different example. But a lot of other social gaming cases, it becomes really clear that what we’re doing is holding back from being maximally skillful in order to.

[08:05] C. Thi Nguyen: To have a really delicious struggle,

[08:07] C. Thi Nguyen: but then during the game itself, trying as hard as we can to win. But let me give you an example. Party games. Imagine if you were the kind of person that looked up strategy for party games on YouTube to beat people at charades.

[08:21] C. Thi Nguyen: You wouldn’t be understanding the point.

[08:23] C. Thi Nguyen: The point is that there’s a dumb activity that we’re all about equal at, right?

[08:27] Travis: And it actually leads to a question. Before I was going to quote a really relevant part of your book,

[08:32] Travis: which is that there’s this challenge too about if you’re playing somebody in a game and it is a casual versus not right. So you talk in your book about Twister and that sort of thing,

[08:43] Travis: that it needs to be generally accepted or it needs to be perceived that everybody has spent maybe around the same amount of time doing that game. I mean, Go is interesting, right?

[08:55] Travis: If I play a high-level dan player who has probably been playing for years, while I am a kyu player who has played for much less time, there is an obvious difference in experience.

[08:59] Travis: Go is unusual because its handicap system still allows those two players to have a meaningful game.

[09:06] Travis: There’s this interesting dynamic where Go is unique because it has a handicapping system. And so you can do that. But with other games,

[09:13] Travis: if one person comes in and they’re just way, way, way better than the other because they spent so much more time to your point, it’s just not going to be fun.

[09:22] C. Thi Nguyen: I often think there’s this like social contractive gameplay. And you can see, I love the example of like serious games and casual games.

[09:30] C. Thi Nguyen: When I used to attend a Go club in Los Angeles, you would begin a game by sensing how seriously both players intended to take it.

[09:37] C. Thi Nguyen: And especially if you’re not on a clock. I think a clock formalizes. But a lot of times if you’re not on a clock, sometimes you’re just in the mood, you’re like, oh, we’re just going to play a pretty casual game and you don’t think too hard because you’re just playing a casual game.

[09:49] C. Thi Nguyen: And other times you’re playing a game and you’re like, okay, no, we can take three hours for this game and you kind of tune in on how seriously you’re taking it.

[09:57] C. Thi Nguyen: That’s part of it. And we can see that. Part of what makes us good striving players is this tuning into the level of seriousness that we’re taking the game. Right.

[10:06] C. Thi Nguyen: Do you know what I mean?

[10:07] Travis: Yeah, totally. I mean, you. You even referenced this, right? You talk about going to the La Go Club and you had your mentor, Joe,

[10:14] Travis: and you say, oh, Joe, what a beautiful person. Yeah, A delightfully odd gentleman who made his living as a chess tutor.

[10:20] Travis: He’d show up every Wednesday and Thursday. But then you kind of go on and you say,

[10:24] Travis: it’s interesting. Joe was a model, a model of gameplay behavior. He played to the limit, fighting tooth and nail, but seemed to be equally pleased to win or lose as long as the game was interesting.

[10:34] Travis: So you kind of get back to that point of like, it’s all about the struggle, right? If you’re just caring about,

[10:40] Travis: you know, winning and those sorts of things, it’s not going to be nearly as enjoyable.

[10:43] C. Thi Nguyen: I remember this moment. So, you know, Joe was this incredible teacher, this incredible mentor. And he was obviously way, I mean,

[10:50] C. Thi Nguyen: so far past me that we weren’t within nine points of each other. So we could never, you know, we weren’t in a normal handicap of each other. So it was mostly only teaching games.

[10:58] C. Thi Nguyen: So it’s getting better and better. And one day we were doing like a nine stone handicap game and it suddenly became clear that I was giving him a real game for once.

[11:05] C. Thi Nguyen: And you could see his mood change. Like he was like, he wasn’t just teaching me, he was locked in and we were really playing.

[11:12] C. Thi Nguyen: And then he was having a great time. And then I [expletive]** it up. I just made like one crucially bad move and so he was gonna win. And his reaction was just.

[11:22] C. Thi Nguyen: He was sad,

[11:23] C. Thi Nguyen: right? And I think that’s. That is very much,

[11:26] C. Thi Nguyen: I think, an exemplar of what it is to be a striving player and in it for the beautiful struggle.

[11:32] C. Thi Nguyen: I think if we were all achievement players when our opponent screwed up, we would be happy. But I think, and I think this is particularly distinctive of Go players, right?

[11:39] C. Thi Nguyen: I see this so often in Go players. Like, the game is beautiful, it’s so good, and if the other person screws up,

[11:45] C. Thi Nguyen: you’re gonna win. But it’s really just sad, right, because the beautiful part of the game is over. And you could just see,

[11:52] C. Thi Nguyen: like, the joy draining out of Joe because he was like, ah, [expletive]. I’m gonna win. Like, come on.

[11:57] Travis: It’s so funny you say that because, like, I can definitely relate with.

[12:01] Travis: If I have a close game and it stays close throughout the game,

[12:05] Travis: I eventually had to stop playing Go because it consumed too much attention and time.

[12:13] Travis: And, like, that. That probably feels good as well. But it.

[12:17] Travis: As I was talking to another gentleman who spent time playing Go in China,

[12:21] Travis: and he would talk about how in certain contexts, like playing in the park with the older gentlemen that played Go there,

[12:28] Travis: he would say, well, actually,

[12:29] Travis: people were all about, like, the thrill of the kill. So, like, they wanted to absolutely blow the other, you know, the opponent out of the water, which is actually very different from that.

[12:40] Travis: Okay, so then you shift over and you talk about this balance between, hey, you need to care enough about winning the game,

[12:47] Travis: otherwise, what are we doing to also enjoy the struggle? And so you actually talk about this when you’re tying it back to the game of Twister. It’s like, if you’re like, I don’t care about playing Twister at all.

[12:59] Travis: It’s a party game, and you’re just like, I don’t care. Then everybody just sort of is like, this is stupid. We shouldn’t be playing it. But then if you go to saying, well, no, like, I want to care a little bit, and then you mess up, then everybody’s really enjoying it.

[13:13] Travis: And you even reference, like, Go. In this section of your book, you say, similarly, I might easily prefer a session of Go where I screw up an early sequence, which maybe you’re talking about, like, joseki, like, in the beginning of the game or whatever it might be,

[13:26] Travis: but which leads us into an utterly new and fascinating situation that I end up losing over the session where I play perfectly and I actually eke out a really dull win.

[13:36] Travis: Right?

[13:36] C. Thi Nguyen: I mean, this Twister example was supposed to be another argument for striving play, by the way, I should say about your people that want the thrill of the kill. My claim is not that striving play is the only way to play.

[13:45] C. Thi Nguyen: It’s that there are two different ways to play.

[13:47] C. Thi Nguyen: Some people, achievement players, care about the victory, and other people care about the struggle.

[13:52] C. Thi Nguyen: Imagine you had a choice. Imagine you could have a life of easy victories, destroying everyone around you because you were just better. You could have a life where you had a lot of interesting games, most of which you lost.

[14:03] C. Thi Nguyen: Maybe you want a few, but they were really interesting. And I think that decision will reveal whether you’re an achievement player or a striving player.

[14:11] C. Thi Nguyen: Here’s another maybe interesting example.

[14:14] C. Thi Nguyen: One reason I no longer play much Go is that I moved from Los Angeles to Utah, where there are not many players. Even as a 7-kyu player, I could not easily find good live games.

[14:25] C. Thi Nguyen: And I just spent too much time on a computer and I want to play online.

[14:28] Travis: Sure.

[14:29] C. Thi Nguyen: And so, like, one of the reasons I play many more European board games now,

[14:33] C. Thi Nguyen: One nice thing about playing many different European-style board games is that a group can rotate among them and remain at roughly comparable skill levels.

[14:40] C. Thi Nguyen: I do not want to become the person who gets extremely good at Settlers of Catan and beats everyone every time. That becomes boring.

[14:46] C. Thi Nguyen: I want to change games so I can have interesting games.

[14:50] Travis: Right.

[14:51] C. Thi Nguyen: That’s another sign of being a striving player.

[14:54] Travis: Kind of also goes back to this point though, that Go is a horrible party game.

[14:58] Travis: Right.

[14:59] Travis: Because like, you come and you’re like, oh, I’m a 7-kyu and like, it took me quite a while to get even to that level. I mean, at least for me, I’m maybe a 9-kyu on an online server.

[15:09] Travis: Like, it took me a long time

[15:10] C. Thi Nguyen: to get to that level hard.

[15:13] Travis: Right.

[15:13] Travis: So it’s horrible for that because then the people with whom you’re playing can’t get up to speed very quickly in a social setting.

[15:20] Travis: But then when you talk about how I don’t really want to play this game anymore because I’m already on the computer a lot also you have a family life and work life.

[15:28] Travis: The other piece of this is that now with the advent of online Go servers and online gaming,

[15:33] Travis: I find this very interesting interplay between people treating Go as a.

[15:40] Travis: You know, there’s always the striving play that you come up with,

[15:44] Travis: but there’s also the winning side and the rank fixation becomes very strong because it’s online and you can see after every game. And so I think a lot of us are at odds with this.

[15:56] Travis: Oh, I really enjoy the struggle and I love it. But then, oh, gosh, that rank number is there. That score is there. Every time it’s going up and then it’s going down, it’s going down and then that brings in other feelings.

[16:07] Travis: And then people say, like, oh, I don’t want to play at all because, like, I don’t want to keep losing.

[16:10] Travis: Um, have you seen this happening? Or do you have any Thoughts on.

[16:14] Travis: On how that’s been changing over time.

[16:17] C. Thi Nguyen: So since I’ve written the games book, most of what I’ve been writing about is not games anymore,

[16:21] C. Thi Nguyen: but gamified rankings in ordinary life.

[16:25] C. Thi Nguyen: So I have a bunch of papers about this concept I’m calling value capture.

[16:29] C. Thi Nguyen: And value capture is what happens when what you actually care about is rich and subtle. And then you can put in a setting next to a simplified scoring system and that scoring system takes over.

[16:41] C. Thi Nguyen: So, you know, maybe you’re a journalist who cared about truth, and then you get obsessed with click numbers or subscriber numbers, or maybe you went on social media to connect to people, but then you get obsessed with like, likes and follows and retweets.

[16:53] Travis: Yes. You spoke about this in your Ezra Klein podcast interview, which was phenomenal.

[16:57] C. Thi Nguyen: Yeah,

[16:57] C. Thi Nguyen: most of my examples, there are examples outside of games, but I also think it can happen in games. And what that looks like is if you played a game originally because it was delightful and interesting, and you get so obsessed with ranking that it pushes you into horrible, ugly play or kinds of activity that you’re not interested in.

[17:19] C. Thi Nguyen: I remember at some point I really enjoy advancing at various points through rock climbing. And as I was getting older, it became clear in order to advance,

[17:27] C. Thi Nguyen: I would have to do this really specific finger strength training routine, which I found really unpleasant.

[17:32] C. Thi Nguyen: And it didn’t make rock climbing any more fun for me. It just like made me able to climb harder stuff. And I kind of started hating it. And then I step back and be like, why am I doing this?

[17:43] C. Thi Nguyen: Why am I making myself do this? And I realized it’s because I’ve been obsessed with this scoring system and that’s not actually why I’m playing the game. Right. That’s not actually what drove me into the game.

[17:55] C. Thi Nguyen: I think Go is an interesting.

[17:57] C. Thi Nguyen: There are some games, I think,

[17:59] C. Thi Nguyen: where your skill at the game is unrelated to the pleasure or interest of the game. So I think there are a lot of party games where if you get better, it doesn’t necessarily make the game better.

[18:10] C. Thi Nguyen: You’re going to beat people, but the game’s not more interesting. And then there are other games like Go, where the interesting thing about Go is that as you get better, the game actually gets more interesting.

[18:21] C. Thi Nguyen: We get an interesting choice. Some people try to improve at Go because they are achievement players and want to win.

[18:29] C. Thi Nguyen: And there are other people that get want to get better at Go because it leads to more interesting and rich play.

[18:36] C. Thi Nguyen: But I suspect In a lot of cases of value capture, what makes the value capture happen is the prominence of the ranking, right? Like the more prominent GPA for it becomes for students, the more they orient it towards grades instead of education.

[18:49] C. Thi Nguyen: The more prominent retweets and likes is, the more people start aiming for that instead of aiming for communication.

[18:56] C. Thi Nguyen: It’s fine to want to get better at Go because the game is more interesting,

[19:00] C. Thi Nguyen: but if you become obsessed with the number on your rank and that leads you to a kind of lifestyle with a game where it’s boring, grinding, or uninteresting,

[19:09] C. Thi Nguyen: what are you doing? Like, why are you, like, what is this for? Like, why the hell are you doing this?

[19:16] C. Thi Nguyen: And AI can beat you already. It doesn’t matter. You’re doing this because it’s enjoyable and interesting for you to do it. So if the joy goes out of it, like, what are you doing?

[19:26] Travis: There’s almost this meta constraint where for me personally, I say, okay, I’ve gotten into this game not early in my life, I’m in my late 30s, I have a family.

[19:35] Travis: But the game is so fascinating. The pandemic allowed me to get into it. Otherwise I don’t think I ever would have.

[19:42] Travis: And then once I got into it, I said, okay, this is really enjoyable, but I would hit up against all those things that you just spoke about, right? You get overly focused on rank, you get overly focused on winning or losing.

[19:53] Travis: And then I realized that, you know what, there’s also a satisfaction and a value in playing that game. And if the focus is,

[20:02] Travis: for me, it’s improving.

[20:04] Travis: There’s also a value in doing it in a thoughtful way that’s not just overload, right? Like, to your point, if I just go overload and I start playing it way too much, I’m also going to get burned out and frustrated or I’m going to go on tilt or something like this.

[20:16] Travis: So I think your point is really well made about this concept of giving these very clear rules and constraints. But then you even need to look at that within your life and how you’re playing that game if it’s not a party game, if it’s a more serious game where there’s just a million levels of understanding.

[20:32] Travis: And t you actually talk about in your book about this concept when you are trying to highlight how in Go,

[20:40] Travis: there is that ability for an experienced Go player to see something on the board that a less seasoned one just will not see,

[20:50] Travis: you kind of talk about. You’re comparing it to, I think it’s Jane Eyre to the book and saying, hey, like, if anybody reads Jane Eyre, most of us can understand, like, hey, here are the key themes or here’s what’s going on.

[21:01] Travis: I kind of equate it to, like, if anybody’s watching a sport, like, if they’re watching hockey.

[21:05] Travis: You don’t need to know much about hockey to know that if you get the puck in the net, you’ve scored a goal. And if you can do that quickly, then that’s great.

[21:13] Travis: But with Go, you look at this board and when I looked at it as a beginner, I don’t know about, for you,

[21:19] Travis: nothing is registering. Like, it’s just,

[21:21] Travis: it’s not making any sense. But then over a very, very long period of time, in the pattern recognition of these better players,

[21:28] Travis: they just understand, oh, you do this, you play this, or you do that.

[21:32] C. Thi Nguyen: You know, one of the incredible things about Go,

[21:35] C. Thi Nguyen: the beauties of Go are so strikingly inaccessible,

[21:38] C. Thi Nguyen: especially the beauty of the opening game. I think, like the subtlety of the opening game.

[21:44] C. Thi Nguyen: Sorry, I haven’t played Go in so long.

[21:46] C. Thi Nguyen: It’s so sad. It was such a beautiful part of my life. But like the subtle ability to see whole sequences and possibilities and strategic flow coming out of subtly different moves and spatial.

[22:02] C. Thi Nguyen: God, I’ve totally lost my language. It’s been so long in the opening.

[22:05] Travis: No, I’m with you. I think everybody that’s listening understands what you’re talking about.

[22:10] C. Thi Nguyen: One of the interesting things about Go is how long it takes to even be able to see any of that kind of strategic, big scale stuff in the opening.

[22:19] C. Thi Nguyen: There is a term for this in one of the classic ghost strategy books, but sometimes you get this moment and it’ll often be like in early mid game to mid game where you step back and you suddenly see that the move before you is completely decisive.

[22:33] C. Thi Nguyen: Do you know what I mean? And it’s not decisive in a small scale. I’ll win this fight. It’s going to change the complete flow of the game, right? Like, you move here and suddenly all the fights will cascade this way or you move there and everything will stabilize.

[22:45] C. Thi Nguyen: Or like you make this one move and suddenly all of the fight will careen across center into. And like, I think for me the most beautiful experience of Go was being able to spot when that was.

[22:58] C. Thi Nguyen: I would have, you know, not as a good player, I would have just blasted through those moments and now you’re like, oh, this is one of decisive moments that will change the entire shape of the game.

[23:07] C. Thi Nguyen: And I think like, it was only like around 12-kyu and I started even being able to spot those,

[23:13] C. Thi Nguyen: even have an inkling of them. And I think, like, really being able to see them is what, like, you know, when I was really getting better than 10-kyu, that’s when I was like, ah, I can spot those.

[23:22] C. Thi Nguyen: That’s, like, a lot of work. So I felt like I was just getting the glimmerings of the beauty of that game.

[23:28] Travis: That’s really cool to hear you say that. And you do speak about that. You say that there are things that,

[23:34] Travis: when you think about, like, do I get something beyond just the skills or the ability to play that game? Well, there are things that apply to outside that game itself in the real world.

[23:44] Travis: And you actually say this. You say a Go player needs to constantly evaluate the strategic value of each particular fight against the whole landscape.

[23:52] Travis: And you said that this way of thinking is actually leaked out to the rest of your agential life because you’re talking about games as ways of having different agency. I should care about this thing.

[24:03] Travis: These should be my goals and motivations.

[24:05] Travis: And so you say that Go has actually made the mental move for you of stepping back and reflecting on the comparative value of your current pursuit or different things that are happening in your life.

[24:16] Travis: Do you feel like that is actually still, like, held through, even though it’s been years and years since you played? And what do you think?

[24:22] C. Thi Nguyen: I think both chess and Go profoundly gave me a kind of mental skill,

[24:28] C. Thi Nguyen: and they were very different. So I played chess first. And chess is the thing that actually probably made me good at the nitty gritty of philosophy. Like, chess taught me to be a rigorous, logical person,

[24:37] C. Thi Nguyen: to look ahead to. To make sure everything was tight, to make sure. Right. But I think the deep difference for me between Chess and Go is that chess is one fight, and like Go is, you know, nine or 12 fights happening at once.

[24:50] C. Thi Nguyen: You constantly have to be deciding between.

[24:52] C. Thi Nguyen: And chess, you have a little bit of this, but rarely you have to be like, which of these three completely currently disconnected fights is the most worthwhile one?

[25:03] C. Thi Nguyen: You can see this especially, like, I think the typical beginner stand in Go is to just get stuck on the fight. You’re at the moment where I first felt like I understood what the nature of the game was, was when I could have a thought like, well, I could win that fight,

[25:17] C. Thi Nguyen: but is it more important to play the first piece in this empty space? You know what I mean, right?

[25:21] Travis: Yes, Right. Or do I capture these stones that are right in this local fight, but over in another part of the board? I could Save and make many more points or save many more points.

[25:30] Travis: That’s a level of progression in the game.

[25:34] C. Thi Nguyen: That is the experience of Go constantly moving between the little picture and the big picture. I think that’s incredible. There are very few games that do that as intensely as Go.

[25:43] C. Thi Nguyen: It’s interesting that infects all of my life, but it’s also interesting the way it affects other games. There are plenty of board games.

[25:51] C. Thi Nguyen: I play with a lot of game players who play a lot of Magic the Gathering. We’ll play like random European board games. And they’ll often be much better at manipulating all the special powers and legaling out all the different and doing a little bit more hard, hardcore calculation.

[26:05] C. Thi Nguyen: And there are all these times when I’ll win a game. And when we look back and try to figure out, we often do breakdowns. Why did you win that game?

[26:12] C. Thi Nguyen: I wasn’t tracking all the little stuff, but there’s a moment where I was like, oh, here’s the big picture that’s really important.

[26:19] C. Thi Nguyen: I can feel my Go brain turn on. I can feel it in board games. I can feel it in, like, fights at the administration of my university. I can feel all these cases where I can feel Go mine come in and step back and be like, is this fight worth having?

[26:33] C. Thi Nguyen: Is it better to spend my resources somewhere else?

[26:36] C. Thi Nguyen: Go asks you to do that literally every move.

[26:40] Travis: Maybe we can also talk a little bit more about thinking about Go in the world of just all the games that you’ve come across.

[26:47] Travis: Right.

[26:48] Travis: I’m sure it’s very specific in a lot of ways, but how do you position Go in that world in terms of it being a form of art in the creation of agency?

[26:57] Travis: You told me in your email when we first connected, you said,

[27:00] Travis: I think Go might be the most beautiful game in existence. Tell us more about that.

[27:06] C. Thi Nguyen: It’s one of these things that is so hard to explain, except I think most of the listeners of this podcast will know the degree to which the large scale, subtle strategic questions interact with the specific tactical questions and the degree to which you can find an elegant movement that, like,

[27:27] C. Thi Nguyen: solves a tactical situation.

[27:29] C. Thi Nguyen: You probably had this experience where, like, here’s the tight solution to this tactical problem. But this move also solves that tactical problem, but also creates a potential for a cascade that will cross.

[27:39] C. Thi Nguyen: You know,

[27:40] C. Thi Nguyen: seeing the integration of the big picture and the little. The little picture and the big picture, there’s not anything else like it. And the richness, especially in the opening game, of, like,

[27:50] C. Thi Nguyen: this strategic potential and the kind of Waves of possibility that move off of every movement.

[27:56] C. Thi Nguyen: I just don’t know another game like it. I feel like I can see more into someone’s, like,

[28:01] C. Thi Nguyen: soul and style from how they move in a Go board than anything else.

[28:05] C. Thi Nguyen: It’s beautiful.

[28:07] C. Thi Nguyen: There’s another universe where I would have only played one game and it would have been Go, and that would have just been it.

[28:13] C. Thi Nguyen: And a lot of what happened was there were some social, like a lot of social circumstances. I think also another thing that happened was.

[28:21] C. Thi Nguyen: So rock climbing is, I think, an also incredibly rich activity.

[28:26] C. Thi Nguyen: And it’s also the kind of activity that do you devote your life to or a huge amount of your life?

[28:30] C. Thi Nguyen: A lot of the board games I play these days are not life devotion activities. They’re, you know, play it 10 times with your friends and move on. And I think I had room in my life for one life devotion activity.

[28:39] C. Thi Nguyen: It was Go or rock climbing. And I mean, a lot of the choice was just, I’m an academic. I spend the rest of my time indoors, crouched over a table.

[28:47] C. Thi Nguyen: And so rock climbing is also a rich, dense game, but also makes my body not hurt. So that’s totally fair.

[28:55] Travis: There is a content creator whose two main interests are Go and rock climbing, so I wondered whether that overlap was purely coincidental.

[29:06] C. Thi Nguyen: I don’t think it’s coincident. Since I’ve been in Utah, I’ve started fly fishing. They’re all really.

[29:11] C. Thi Nguyen: Fly fishing and climbing and Go are in this constellation of incredibly rich, high attention,

[29:17] C. Thi Nguyen: high depth,

[29:19] C. Thi Nguyen: very like meditative, very like trance state activities. They’re all very aesthetic and sensitizing. It is unsurprising to me if anybody likes one of these things,

[29:28] C. Thi Nguyen: that they would also like the other. Although you don’t find a lot that do all of them because each of them is individually a life consuming.

[29:35] C. Thi Nguyen: If you’re into fly fishing or into Go, you might just spend all your spare time doing that.

[29:40] Travis: How do you think about the game of Go in terms of its ability to actually gain popularity within a population, particularly a Western one, because it’s really having its roots in eastern culture.

[29:51] C. Thi Nguyen: If you knew nothing about either game and were shown chess and Go, could you tell which one was Eastern and which one was Western?

[30:02] C. Thi Nguyen: Maybe

[30:04] Travis: I’m trying not. I’m trying not to laugh, but yeah, yeah.

[30:07] C. Thi Nguyen: There are historical reasons why Go is more Popular in Asia than in the West. I think, for example, ancient Chinese poetry is really inaccessible to people that haven’t had a lot of study in that culture.

[30:20] C. Thi Nguyen: Take a chess player and teach that person Go without providing any background in Asian culture; the player may still become completely absorbed in it. The game has something like the universality of mathematics.

[30:31] C. Thi Nguyen: It seems pretty abstracted away from particular cultural origins.

[30:36] C. Thi Nguyen: Do you want my dumb argument that Go is better than chess?

[30:38] Travis: Absolutely, let’s hear it.

[30:40] C. Thi Nguyen: I don’t know if the world will hate me for this and I have known a lot of people that learned chess and then learned Go and never went back to chess.

[30:48] C. Thi Nguyen: I have not heard of anyone who learned Go and then learned chess and was like, oh my God, chess.

[30:55] Travis: Interesting.

[30:56] C. Thi Nguyen: But this also might be because I’m in the West. Maybe if I was in China we would meet a bunch of Go players who had fallen in love with chess. So that might be a biased information set.

[31:06] C. Thi Nguyen: Yes, but as far as I know,

[31:09] C. Thi Nguyen: and maybe I’m just projecting from my personal experience, I learned chess first and then I learned Go and I was like, I’ll never go back. Actually I have gone back because my 8 year old got excited about chess because he found chess TikTok and he learned chess and he wants to play chess.

[31:22] C. Thi Nguyen: So I play chess again now a hundred with my 8 year old.

[31:26] C. Thi Nguyen: I just think like once you see the strategic broadness of Go and that need to go in and out of the big picture to little picture chess feels really small.

[31:36] C. Thi Nguyen: I probably studied chess as much as I studied Go and yeah,

[31:41] C. Thi Nguyen: it’s hard to go back.

[31:43] Travis: Okay, very quick couple questions for lightning round. What’s your favorite memory of playing Go?

[31:49] C. Thi Nguyen: I already told it to you. It’s the moment with Joe where I was like where I gave him a good game for one split for like 10 minutes and then he was so sad when I [expletive]** it up.

[32:04] Travis: And I think we also answered it as well. But you know, why did you stop? What would it take for you to return to your life in a regular way?

[32:10] C. Thi Nguyen: I love gaming physically.

[32:12] C. Thi Nguyen: I played extensively on online servers, including the Kiseido Go Server (KGS). But I prefer the physicality of games, and if I had a thriving local community, I think I could return to Go.

[32:24] C. Thi Nguyen: But it’s hard not to be far away from a Go club where you can like hang out.

[32:30] C. Thi Nguyen: Also time wise, my gaming time is very much like also friends and family time. I’ve only got like an evening or two for games that I can Squeeze in with my friends.

[32:39] C. Thi Nguyen: And so I tend to play European board games that we can all learn.

[32:44] C. Thi Nguyen: So it’s really the social environment.

[32:47] C. Thi Nguyen: Whenever I think about Go, I realize how much I miss the game.

[32:51] Travis: Can you give us a Recommendation? What are 1, 2, 3 games you think Go players should check out and why they might appreciate them?

[32:58] C. Thi Nguyen: Oh, my God. That’s a great question.

[33:01] C. Thi Nguyen: For strategic richness, there’s an old classic European board game called El Grande by Wolfgang Kramer. It is technically nothing like Go,

[33:11] C. Thi Nguyen: but the strategic decisions are as rich as Go.

[33:15] C. Thi Nguyen: I mean, maybe not as rich, but it felt in the vicinity. And the core strategic decision is you have this board state, you’re all moving pieces around,

[33:23] C. Thi Nguyen: trying to crowd areas. It does actually feel a little bit like Go abstracted for five players.

[33:28] C. Thi Nguyen: And then every turn there are five possible actions that get turned up that are all totally different,

[33:34] C. Thi Nguyen: totally different in strength and totally different what they do. Like, really distinct, like move all your pieces across the board and then you bid money on what order you’ll pick your action from.

[33:46] C. Thi Nguyen: And that decision is just so complicated and strategically rich. That’s amazing.

[33:52] C. Thi Nguyen: There are all these games from the great German game designer Reiner Knizia. He definitely loved Go and he was interested in making multiplayer games. I think his classic game, Tigris and Euphrates, the newest one in this school is Babylonia.

[34:05] C. Thi Nguyen: The harder Knizia games in which you place tiles are clearly attempts to translate some of the feel of Go for three, four, or five players.

[34:16] C. Thi Nguyen: The most interesting modern game I know is Root by Cole Wehrle. People who like Go often like Root even though it is completely different.

[34:24] C. Thi Nguyen: but it has a lot of strategic richness and it does something that Go could never do. So the core of Root is that there are different political sides. One side is the industrialists, one side is the communist revolutionaries, one side is the arms dealer, one side is the religious leader.

[34:39] C. Thi Nguyen: And each one has totally different rules and totally different goals. And over many games, you change sides.

[34:45] C. Thi Nguyen: And so that game is amazing and gives you something that Go would never give you, which is asymmetry of rules and goals.

[34:54] Travis: C. Thi Nguyen. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

[34:57] C. Thi Nguyen: Thank you.

Sponsors

[35:22] Travis: Okay, quick break. It’s time to thank our individual contributors. I really appreciate it. It really helps. And also the sponsors for the episode.

[35:31] Travis: The first sponsor is AI Sensei. You can get your games analyzed with their advanced AI for free.

[35:37] Travis: They also have paid versions where you can get higher playout levels and you can take your Go to the next level by using quizzes, remembering board states, all sorts of stuff.

[35:47] Travis: You can go to ai-sensei.com to learn more.

[35:51] Travis: This episode is also sponsored by Go Magic, which is a modern way to study Go like never before with an online platform. To learn the game of Go. They have this awesome thing called Ghost Mode where you can try a problem and really test your reading skills without seeing the moves that you play.

[36:07] Travis: You can find Go Magic at gomagic.org. SmartGo One is also a sponsor of this episode and offers tools for learning, computer play, professional-game study, problems, and interactive Go books.

[36:24] Travis: It’s available in the App Store for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Go Books are also available in EPUB format for other devices too. So check them out.

[36:34] Travis: And then finally, our last sponsor for the episode is BadukPop, which is a great app to use for players of any level to play games against people all over the world.

[36:43] Travis: You can download the BadukPop app from the App Store or visit badukpop.com—that is B-A-D-U-K.

[36:52] Travis: And with that we will jump right back in.

Pixel Go with TelegraphGo

[36:57] Travis: Now we’re going to talk again with Telegraph Go, where I ask him the question,

[37:02] Travis: what is your favorite variant for the game of Go?

[37:05] Travis: To which he responded, Pixel Go, which I’d never heard of before.

[37:10] Travis: So let’s jump on over to that and he’s going to explain to us exactly what Pixel Go is.

[37:18] TelegraphGo: So Pixel Go is a variant where you place two by two blobs on the board,

[37:24] TelegraphGo: Pixel Go is a variant that treats small blocks of intersections as larger units, creating a different way to think about shape and territory.

[37:37] TelegraphGo: You can do that. And then if the next person put four stones on 22323 and 3 3,

[37:43] TelegraphGo: then they wouldn’t put the stone over here like 22 stone, but they would put the other three stones down.

[37:49] Travis: Huh.

[37:50] Travis: So it has to overlap or no,

[37:51] TelegraphGo: so it doesn’t have to overlap. You can put the two by two blob wherever you’d like,

[37:55] TelegraphGo: but it often does end up overlapping. The stones come in contact with each other eventually.

[37:59] TelegraphGo: And Pixel Go is really interesting because of a few reasons. Life and death is really weird because you can put two by two at once.

[38:09] TelegraphGo: So like a diagonal two eyes. Two eyes which are just one diagonal away from each other is actually killable. That’s only One eye.

[38:16] Travis: Oh yeah. Interesting.

[38:19] TelegraphGo: There’s all sorts of like territory shenanigans and stuff. The way that the contact fights work, it tends to be a race in like one direction where each player can play a pixel that curls on top of the other pixel and then the other person can play a pixel that curls back on top of the other one.

[38:36] TelegraphGo: I don’t know how to describe it if you haven’t.

[38:37] Travis: So instead of a running battle, it’s like curling, curling, curling kind of.

[38:41] TelegraphGo: It turns out to be kind of like a running battle, but it works fundamentally quite differently since each person’s follow up to the running battle is like a giga turn where they turn and play the next move on top.

[38:51] TelegraphGo: And it’s like completely crushing but you still have to allow that sometimes in order to keep speed.

[38:56] TelegraphGo: I like it.

[38:58] TelegraphGo: That’s cool. I think it’s really interesting.

[39:00] Travis: Do you play that when you’re just sort of,

[39:02] Travis: Do you play that when you do not want to do serious tsumego or play a full game? Do you pick it up at odd hours with a friend, or just randomly?

[39:10] TelegraphGo: I haven’t played it in a while actually. Okay,

Learning Themes with Nathan Harwit

[39:16] Travis: Now we are going to talk with my Go teacher, Nathan Harwit, a roughly 6-dan amateur who is well established in the Boulder, Colorado, Go community.

[39:23] Travis: very well established in the Go community out in Boulder, Colorado. And I wanted to sit down with him and just talk through some of the more recent themes and lessons that I’ve been gaining from our sessions together because I think it is useful for people that are at my level of play,

[39:41] Travis: whether that’s 8-, 9-, or 10-kyu range and possibly lower and higher. So we’re going to jump over to that conversation now and Nathan’s going to give us a little bit of an explanation and I’m going to sort of play with some of those concepts in real time because I think they are things that a lot of us think about.

[39:58] Travis: So let’s get to it.

[40:03] Travis: All right. So what I was thinking, Nathan, was that you’ve been able to give me these really nice themes throughout our time working together.

[40:11] Travis: And I just thought that it’s helpful for us to actually share that because they almost boil down to being pseudo proverbs in a way.

[40:20] Travis: So for context on OGS, I’m what,

[40:23] Travis: somewhere around the 8 to 9-kyu, something like that, depending on the time format.

[40:28] Travis: And we’ve been working through some of these themes. So I can either mention a couple of ones that I think of or there are some that it sounds like you’ve already written out, so maybe you

[40:39] Nathan Harwit: want to go first.

[40:40] Nathan Harwit: Yeah. The main one I was going to talk about is starting from the greediest move and working the other way. That’s like the major thing I see.

[40:47] Nathan Harwit: But then the other one wasn’t really game related. It was more just like a mindset thing of you make some small improvements to your game and you’re just slightly better.

[40:55] Nathan Harwit: That can have really large cascading effects. And I was going to talk about like the. If you’re at your rank, like you said earlier today, actually it’s like 50, 50,

[41:04] Nathan Harwit: you win half the game. So five out of 10, let’s say. But if one of those games, because you improved a little bit, you actually won the game that you would have lost, you’re now at six wins, four losses.

[41:14] Nathan Harwit: And if you keep that win rate up, that actually means you improve your rank at least and you go up a lot.

[41:20] Travis: Okay, great. So that’s perfect. Let’s actually start with that real quick. So you were talking about this concept. What I’ve been noticing, depending on what time, format I play on, OGS and these sorts of things, is that I will be at a certain rank and then I will float and fluctuate around,

[41:35] Travis: up and down a rank or two and I’ll find like, wait a second, I’m losing against a rank that’s one lower than me.

[41:42] Travis: But then to your point, you’re saying, hey Travis, that’s actually fairly expected. Not only are there a bunch of different styles, but also the fact that if you are at a true level or rank, you should be winning what, half of those games?

[41:58] Nathan Harwit: Roughly. If you are evenly matched with an opponent, you should win about half the time.

[42:04] Travis: So how do you think that works out? Like let’s say, you know, if I’m a 10-kyu and I play a 14-kyu,

[42:10] Travis: it’s really just balance of probability, is it not? So it’s like if I think about the weather and I say there’s a 30% chance of rain and it rains,

[42:17] Travis: that doesn’t mean the probability is wrong.

[42:19] Nathan Harwit: Right.

[42:20] Travis: Three times out of ten it can still rain.

[42:22] Travis: So in this case we’re saying the same thing. It’s like, of course you can lose against a weaker player,

[42:27] Travis: but the idea is that if you’re truly at that 10-kyu rank, you should only lose to that 14-kyu. A minority, right? Less than half.

[42:36] Nathan Harwit: Yeah.

[42:36] Travis: Of the time.

[42:36] Nathan Harwit: There’s actually some math behind it because it’s, I think the Go rating systems and elo, you can convert it to An Elo system.

[42:44] Travis: Yeah.

[42:44] Nathan Harwit: Each stone is about a hundred points. And in chess,

[42:47] Nathan Harwit: I believe if it’s a hundred points, like your one stone, if you’re 10-kyu against 11-kyu, you should win 66 of the time. About two thirds. One stone is about 66.

[42:58] Nathan Harwit: Two stones is closer to like 75ish then three stones and up is like 80 to 90% range. So if you’re 10-kyu and you played a 13-kyu,

[43:07] Nathan Harwit: you should win about four and five games roughly.

[43:11] Travis: That’s really helpful. Got it. So if I’m playing three to four stones up, I should win roughly 80, 90%.

[43:18] Nathan Harwit: Yeah.

[43:18] Travis: Three out of four games. Ish. And if I’m not, that means I’m not really truly my rank. I’m not really settled. Right.

[43:27] Nathan Harwit: Yeah. You probably have to get in at least 10 games because you can’t just go, oh, we cherry picked one game we lost. It’s like, okay, we’re actually 13-kyu. It’s like, no.

[43:36] Travis: Right. You need a sample size. You need more than just one or two to understand if it’s a fluke or if it’s something else.

[43:42] Travis: I also almost find that the way I’m thinking now about how I’m doing in terms of am I going up in rank or down in rank, which is not the most important thing,

[43:53] Travis: but it is a thing is now what I’m doing instead of looking at what my actual rank is, I’m trying to say how many people have I played of a certain rank and how many of those have I won or lost?

[44:07] Travis: Yeah, that’s good because that’s starting to like. Okay, so this last batch you’ve recommended, like, hey, if you want to improve, maybe you should be playing somebody at your rank or maybe two or three stones stronger.

[44:19] Travis: It’ll just more clearly outline your weaknesses.

[44:23] Travis: And what frustrates me more is that the ranking system, I can actually get higher and higher in rank, but only play weaker players.

[44:31] Nathan Harwit: Yeah, to a degree on OGS is slightly messed up for that.

[44:35] Travis: Right.

[44:36] Travis: But I mean, theoretically, if I lose one of those weaker matches, it should really hurt my ranking. So it’s.

[44:42] Nathan Harwit: Should. Yeah.

[44:43] Travis: Okay, that makes a lot of sense. So then the other thing you were talking about is we did talk on a previous setup about the like play the greediest move, but maybe you can just re articulate that for me.

[44:57] Nathan Harwit: Yeah. So I’d say a major issue I see the most when I’m teaching like the 20-kyu to even 5-kyu range and even slightly stronger is most players start from.

[45:10] Nathan Harwit: I mean it Makes sense because emotionally you’re like, oh, I need to protect myself and not get killed here.

[45:15] Nathan Harwit: I need to think about how to escape, run away, and avoid dying. The problem is that players in the 20-kyu to 5-kyu range often default to that safe mindset and do not consider attacking the opponent.

[45:32] Nathan Harwit: Because if you start with the greediest move and you work backwards, if the greediest move, which is like the attacking move, aggressive move, actually ends up working because it kills the opponent and by killing them, you also protect yourself, that has to be better than just only defending yourself because you literally killed them.

[45:51] Nathan Harwit: So then you generally also saving your time because a lot of these online games are timed. You want to start from the most aggressive greedy move.

[45:59] Nathan Harwit: And then if that doesn’t work, you can always default to your safe move instead of doing it the other way. Where you oftentimes don’t even think about the kind of aggressive, greedy move.

[46:10] Travis: Do you think part of the reason why people might not naturally lean towards it,

[46:14] Travis: some people do. If they’re more aggressive in their nature, they will. But others that are not, like myself, I’m not naturally leaning that way. Is part of it that there might be this perception around how much I’m winning and losing because we are all affected by it.

[46:29] Travis: So I would imagine that way of being greedy and doing the greedier way may lead to more losses,

[46:37] Travis: whereas I don’t know how to think about it. It’s like you might get more losses, but you might learn more things that don’t work.

[46:45] Travis: But if you play the defensive moves,

[46:47] Travis: you’ve lost maybe, and you haven’t even learned anything because you didn’t try anything.

[46:53] Nathan Harwit: Yeah. So the main thing there is that I think the main reason people default to the safe move is it feels really bad to get your group killed. It feels really bad.

[47:02] Nathan Harwit: Moving from 20-kyu to 5-kyu often comes from learning many fundamental patterns rather than mastering one advanced concept.

[47:16] Nathan Harwit: like, well, I’ll just save myself first. Because you can’t die. There’s no way to test your life and death skills, your reading skills. You’re just kind of like.

[47:24] Nathan Harwit: A great deal of play is also autopilot. Players repeat familiar defenses and do not always think outside the box.

[47:31] Travis: Got it.

[47:33] Travis: What were some of the other themes that you had? Was there anything else you had drafted up? So you had said,

[47:38] Travis: well, we were talking about reading. Right. So we were talking about at my level to get further down, closer to the 5-kyu range,

[47:49] Travis: what would start to come into play or some other things. So what are those things?

[47:54] Nathan Harwit: Once players enter the single-digit kyu ranks, reading becomes increasingly important because they encounter more fights.

[48:04] Nathan Harwit: And a lot of those games even in like the 9, 10, 11-kyu range is just like one big fight determines who wins because it’s so volatile, it’s like one person plays it correctly, they kill.

[48:14] Nathan Harwit: And it doesn’t matter if they made 10 point mistakes elsewhere because the whole group was worth a hundred.

[48:19] Nathan Harwit: So a lot of it is like okay, who’s reading cleaner? Who is reading better because those big fights start mattering, I guess a little bit more. I would say as you get closer to like 5-kyu and whatever.

[48:33] Travis: You were saying that once players reach some level of dan strength, reading becomes especially important.

[48:41] Nathan Harwit: Reading is always important.

[48:45] Travis: Suppose someone is very good at reading but is still in the double-digit or single-digit kyu ranks.

[48:52] Travis: they may very well rise through the ranks simply because they could read super well.

[48:56] Travis: But the point you were making was that the other way is somebody might not be tremendous at reading,

[49:02] Travis: but they’ve just done so many games, they’ve done so much pattern recognition that you quote unquote get to 1-dan. Can you say anything else about that?

[49:13] Nathan Harwit: You need some reading ability to reach dan level or to improve generally.

[49:20] Nathan Harwit: But you can sort of manipulate the game in a way where you can have less reading decisions. So I would say you could probably get to 1-dan if you can read like five, six moves out.

[49:34] Nathan Harwit: Sometimes you generally need to do more than that. But you can sort of play in a way that simplifies decisions for yourself.

[49:41] Nathan Harwit: A player can simplify the game by favoring moyo-oriented or third-line territorial positions, reducing the number of reading decisions. In that way, someone might reach about 1-dan without reading deeply in every position.

[49:57] Travis: And then I responded by saying, wow, really only five to seven moves. I read five to seven moves, and

[50:03] Nathan Harwit: you said, and then we tested it and you read out like 13 moves. So fair.

[50:06] Travis: But that was really hard for me. But I think the key point is that when I look out five to seven moves, I feel very low confidence in what the evaluation and judgment is at that point.

[50:18] Travis: So we talked about the fact that I was having a hard time visualizing the number of liberties around those groups when I read out that far, which almost is to say it’s not even that useful at all if I can’t do that.

[50:31] Travis: So that’s something that I’m going to work on.

[50:33] Travis: The other reaction I have, actually, as we’re thinking about it, is that I’ve been lucky enough to play some. Some teaching games like I do with yourself, but also with other players that are around the 2- to 3-kyu on OGS.

[50:49] Travis: The interesting thing is that they seem to read quite a bit. I mean, they read obviously much better than I do. They also have much better understanding of all the different patterns and shapes that are happening.

[51:00] Travis: And yet still it’s like they’re 2 and 3-kyu OGS if they’re trying to get to 1-dan.

[51:06] Travis: It’s somewhat asymptotic. You’re getting there, but it is just slower and slower.

[51:11] Nathan Harwit: Yeah, plateau is off because. Yeah, plateaus, yeah.

[51:15] Travis: Right. So, like, what do you make of that? I mean, if you’re saying, hey,

[51:20] Travis: you just need to be reading a little bit and you. You can get there,

[51:23] Travis: does that still connect back? I mean, when I. When I see them playing me or others, it’s like it seems like they’re reading so much. So, I mean, am I just misjudging that?

[51:33] Nathan Harwit: Well, just because you could get to 1-dan with only reading five or six moves doesn’t mean that most people are going to be doing that.

[51:39] Nathan Harwit: Generally, a 1-dan player will read better than a 5-kyu player.

[51:43] Nathan Harwit: Like, your rank is just a combination of, like, how good you are at certain things. So there’s like reading, judgment,

[51:50] Nathan Harwit: counting. A lot of people aren’t too good at that.

[51:53] Nathan Harwit: Some people are really good at winning when they’re already winning and they, like, hold on to a win.

[51:58] Nathan Harwit: A lot of people just play so aggressive. They are very likely or more likely to lose games they’re already winning. So there’s like a lot of skills people have.

[52:07] Nathan Harwit: And at the end of the day, it’s like, if you’re on average winning 50% of the time against a 1-dan, then you are basically 1-dan by definition. So it’s like there’s a whole bunch of things.

[52:18] Nathan Harwit: And I would say reading is very important.

[52:20] Nathan Harwit: You can shape the game so that you need to read less. That is why someone might reach 1-dan with limited depth, but most 1-dan players will read much better than five or six moves.

[52:32] Travis: But then if you think about efficiency of how quickly you wanted to try to improve at the game, let’s say that you could do a sheer volume of just playing a lot of games and somehow control how much you were or weren’t reading versus playing fewer games.

[52:52] Travis: But you’re really trying to read out like you’re making a very intentional effort. It doesn’t mean you’re good at it, but you’re trying to.

[52:59] Travis: It sounds like the trying to read path would yield better results. Again, it’s all contingent on. On how good you are, how much you’re improving at the reading. Because it’s like a lot of where I see people are really improving a lot.

[53:12] Travis: There’s certainly exception is like they are just playing huge quantities of games.

[53:17] Nathan Harwit: Yeah. The big thing with reading too is like there’s no way that you’re going to be reading out 10 different branches 10 moves deep on every single move. You just run out of time.

[53:27] Nathan Harwit: You’d just like be exhausted after move. So a lot of that is intuition. So it’s like, okay,

[53:33] Nathan Harwit: intuitively I am incentivized to read these three branches. And your brain just automatically knows because you’ve played thousands of games.

[53:42] Nathan Harwit: And so once you know that, then it’s like your brain’s already trained to only look at these couple branches and then you read a bit and that’s it. So it’s like they’re gonna have a one.

[53:51] Nathan Harwit: A dan player is also likely to have better intuition and a stronger general feel for the game than a 10-kyu player.

[53:53] Nathan Harwit: just general feel for the game than a 10-kyu almost all the time.

[53:57] Travis: Got it. And it’s funny, I mean this is back to that point of like. It’s probably just my lack of understanding of the Elo system. But it is strange to me that like within my correspondence rank on 19 by 19, I’m at like a 7.5 or 7.7-kyu or -1.

[54:14] Travis: And yet when I look at all the opponents I’ve played, I think I’ve only beaten 1 7-kyu.

[54:20] Travis: Right.

[54:21] Travis: Everybody else has been something higher. So it’s after 50, 60 games. So it’s an interesting. Again, I’m. I’ve not fully baked out why that is, but it’s interesting so cool. Awesome.

[54:33] Travis: Nathan, thank you very much. I appreciate it.

[54:35] Nathan Harwit: Yep, no problem.

Cheating in Chess and Go with Gazza White

[54:56] Travis: To close this episode about games—not only Go, but games more broadly—

[55:01] Travis: I talked with Gazza White again and we discussed the concept of cheating in Go and if there have been any recent examples of cheating as well as how that compares to cheating in the world of chess, which has actually brought a lot of popularity to the game.

[55:16] Travis: So we’re going to go ahead and shift over to that conversation.

[55:22] Travis: What have you seen around cheating? I mean, have there been any notable situations? And it’s just interesting to me because one thing that’s made the chess world particularly popular, and I’d love your thoughts on it, is that in the last year to two there’s been so many cheating allegations going on,

[55:40] Travis: particularly at the top of that game and it has created a lot of interest. And one thing that they say is that when the chess players are playing online on Chess.com,

[55:49] Travis: they’re looking for these situations where somebody out of nowhere has a meteoric increase in their ranking and they go wait a second, that’s just not possible. Or it’s very unlikely.

[56:00] Travis: To turn it back to you, Gazza, I do not closely follow the professional scene, but it does not seem that cheating allegations arise constantly.

[56:13] Travis: But have you seen any? Have there been been in notable ones

[56:17] Gazza White: happening regarding cheating allegations in professional Go?

[56:23] Gazza White: They’re quite sparse.

[56:26] Gazza White: It’s notable that when one does take place, typically the the ones that do exist end up getting a lot of drama about it. And I think that’s because it’s so rare.

[56:37] Gazza White: One of the reasons why Go doesn’t have as many cheating allegations is because in the professional side at least,

[56:44] Gazza White: most of professional Go happens between four regions, Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan.

[56:50] Gazza White: And they have their own official organizations.

[56:54] Gazza White: Japan has the Nihon Ki-in and Kansai Ki-in, Korea has the Korean Baduk Association, China has the Chinese Weiqi Association, and Taiwan has its own professional organization.

[56:57] Gazza White: Korea has the Korean Baduk Association,

[57:00] Gazza White: China has the Chinese Weiqi Association and so on.

[57:04] Gazza White: And when they hold tournaments, these organizations take on the responsibility of having the anti cheating measures as well as and because these are professionals, these are also professional organizations. So there’s definitely some level of professionalism involved in organizing of tournaments and they seem to take anti cheating seriously.

[57:28] Gazza White: Whereas in chess tournaments, often outside of the most popular tournaments, a lot of chess tournaments are sort of open tournaments that where you’ll have grandmasters, you’ll have international masters, you have completely intermediate players,

[57:42] Gazza White: amateurs and stuff like that. And although they’re all run under FIDE,

[57:48] Gazza White: the International organization. It’s typically run by representatives of FIDE from whichever country the tournament takes place in.

[57:55] Gazza White: So there’s a lot of implicit trust that these FIDE representatives will make sure that cheating doesn’t take place.

[58:03] Gazza White: For instance, I competed in a chess tournament recently and there were certainly rules like you couldn’t have your phone with you and things like that. But if you were malicious enough and you wanted to cheat,

[58:16] Gazza White: it wouldn’t have been all that difficult.

[58:19] Gazza White: That’s the impression that I got. You can have family and friends be in the room watching your games.

[58:26] Gazza White: I had a friend who was there to watch my games. And if, if we both decided to be, you know, really mean and win by whatever means possible, we could have.

[58:36] Gazza White: We could have developed some ridiculous coding system to communicate. In Go, however, the Korean tournaments I watch on Baduk TV appear to police the games much more strictly.

[58:53] Travis: Yeah.

[58:53] Travis: I was even hearing something like on the chess side, I heard that in in-person games, there was one example where the coach was standing at a certain position around the board to try to help the player know where to play.

[59:08] Travis: I don’t know how that would work on the Go board because there’s just so many more positions, but I think

[59:14] Gazza White: This is All Things Go.

[59:22] Gazza White: Yeah.

[59:23] Gazza White: But there actually has been a case this year in 2025 of a professional player getting caught for cheating.

[59:31] Gazza White: A Chinese player,

[59:32] Gazza White: The Chinese professional Qin Siyue was caught with a mobile phone hidden in her lap during the women’s division of the National Go Championship (Individual).

[59:45] Gazza White: Actually, this event took place in December 2024, but most of the news about it was available in 2025.

[59:53] Gazza White: But what seemed to have happened is that she hid the phone, entered the venue early before the tournament started and hid the phone so then she could access it during the competition and then tried to lie about it after getting caught.