Confessions of a KYU Player

September 01, 2003
by Jonathan Englander

Even though I have haunted the kyu ranks for a decade, it was not until this year’s U.S. Go Congress that I finally began to glimpse a faint light at the end of the long tunnel. Enlightenment flickered after my first game in the U.S. Open, a typical, three-stage game of the sort every kyu player has played countless times. Stage One: in the early middle game, my opponent spanks me for an ill-conceived corner invasion, killing off my feeble group and making text-book thickness in the process. Stage Two: I respond by slamming down a series of bullying overplays, eager to demonstrate that I am not a player to be trifled with, despite all appearances to the contrary. Stage Three: My overheated play infects my opponent with sufficient anxiety that he makes his own, late-game foul-up. There’s no time for him to recover, and it goes in the “W” column for me.

On the ugly way to victory, I had stumbled across the Competing Colossal Blunders Theory of kyu level go. According to this theory, all kyu players make colossal blunders and whoever does so first probably wins. Actual skill, I realized with a sinking heart as I dropped off my winning game slip, plays a relatively minor role in kyu play, since the Colossal Blunder is virtually the defining characteristic of the kyu game. Fellow kyu players, can you think of a game where some hasty tenuki hasn’t left you sealed in like some David Blaine magic stunt about to go horribly wrong? Can you count all those 20-stone invasions that suddenly find themselves clinging to ko for life with a fervor that would have embarrassed Kate and Leo at the end of Titanic? ‘Nuff said. Because go is an additive game in which board positions crystallize with each play, players that makes their Colossal Blunder the earliest, while situations are still fluid, actually stand the best chance of mitigating the damage, coming back and outlasting the other guys, whose own Colossal Blunders are still just dark clouds on the horizon. 

Indeed, there is a huge difference, not just strategic but emotional as well, between (for example) a middle game foray into an opposing moyo that turns out badly, and rudely discovering in the end game that the center clump of stones you thought was connected to your side group by a keima was in reality attached only by the gossamer wisps of your dreams. When you screw up early on, you don’t just fight back, you fight back furiously, snorting and chuckling and full of bravado. If go is a game of hand talk, this is where we crack our knuckles, throw gang signs, flip our opponent the bird. When our Colossal Blunder comes late in the game, though, we sag almost immediately: mortally gutted, our eyes giving a panicked, disbelieving flutter one last time about the board, hoping desperately to find a similar, leveling oversight on our opponent’s part, before the resignation escapes our lips with our last, agonal breath. 

Like me, you may well wonder “At what cost victory if we become graceless boobs in the process?” Amateurish play, after all, does not excuse amateurish etiquette, and, in “The Treasure Chest Enigma,” Noriyuki Nakayama writes perceptively about the insult both to our opponent and the game itself in persisting in the face of a hundred-point deficit. On the other hand, as Janice Kim once put it so very succinctly, “never resign an amateur game because you never know what your opponent might do.” Both Nakayama and Kim are right, depending on your level of play. Nakayama and Ishiguro move in the exalted world of professional play, where the twin gods of logic and reason have banished the Colossal Blunder. I, on the other hand, am still thumping around the amateur kyu fields, where myriad lesser imps and demons conspire to unleash veritable hordes of Colossal Blunders right up until the very end of the game. The pros rely on their skill, while we amateurs, unfortunately, can reasonably expect a bit of diabola ex machina help from our adversaries on a regular basis. So while I admire the pros, I accept my fate as a kyu player, doomed to screw up early, fight back hard, and pray for the shodan. 

2-kyu Jonathan Englander lives and works in New York City. 

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