I am an indifferent and somewhat uninterested player of Go. I find chess far more congenial, especially as I endow each piece with its own personality and goals. This technique almost invariably leads to defeat, since at least one of my bishops is named "Berkeley", and insists on that he is only a perception in God's (i. e.my) mind. To refute him, one of my rooks will go try to kick a pawn, and get swallowed up. There is merriment overhead, but it is very far away.

It's harder to imagine that the identical black rocks slowly being strangled by my opponent have individual volition, and so their deaths go unmourned. I know that Go is far more complex than chess, and that the elegance of this complexity arising from such simple rules is astounding. But my feeling is, if I wanted complexity I didn't understand, I'd go into tax law or study beetles. Anyway.

Proclus is far better than I, although I don't know what kind of practice he's had of late. He introduced my to the Go books of Cho Chikun (All About Life and Death), as well as the "Elementary Go Series", even lending me his copy of Vol. 7, Handicap Go, by Yoshiaki Nagahara and Richard Bozulich. Since that was six years ago, and I have it in front of me as I type this, I doubt he's getting it back. Both books are clear, logically, and extremely useful.

And what's the fun in that? Tax law and beetles, gentle reader. Fortunately, I stumbled across a Go book which fulfills my need for elaborately named strategems, while still providing a decent analysis of play. It's Ma Xiaochun's The Thirty-Six Stratagems Applied to Go. The 36 Stratagems are military maxims from ancient works. They have names like "Murder With a Borrowed Knife" and "Lead Away a Goat in Passing" and "The Cicada Sheds Its Skin" and "Make Friends With Distant Countries and Attack Your Neighbors" (one that China's been using for a while now) and "Point at the Mulberry to Curse the Locust Tree". Ma Xiaochun tries to show how they apply to the game of Go. I've always been skeptical of the claim that skill in Go translates into real strategic insight, but he makes a good (i.e. incomprehensible to me) case for it.

Couldn't find it on Amazon, so I guess it'll remain my secret weapon the next time Proclus and I sit down by a board. That is, I'll "Hide a Dagger with a Smile". Or possibly "Sacrifice Plums for Peaches". Maybe another reading is in order.

"Besiege Wei to Rescue Zhao"?