Way of teaching Go is an instructional article describing a method of teaching Go to children (guess why I’m blogging this).

The article suggests playing Atari-Go (or Ponnuki-Go), which seems to be the recommended method of teaching Go to beginners. That is, play the simple capture game where the only goal is to capture one stone from your opponent.

Where the article gets interesting is suggesting to continue with Atari-Go to larger boards and upping the number of stones required. First of all, it can be used as a handicap: the better player needs to capture more stones. What’s really interesting: when the game is played on a large board and both players need to capture, say, 10 stones, it’s starting to get closer to regular Go.

That is, territory starts to count. In the end, the player with the bigger territory will win and sooner or later, you can start to quit games when you can see that one of the players will win, because they have more territory. When you reach that point, you’re basically the ko rules away from playing regular Go.

This is something to remember. Oh, and if anybody has any practical knowledge of teaching Go to small children, I’m interested.