How I started playing with humans.

I tend to form strong associations between games and the people I learn them from. Unfortunately, if my relationship with that person goes sour, so can my love of the game. So when I was first learning Go, I avoided playing with humans because I wanted to solidify how I felt about the game itself before forming any strong association between it and third parties.

About 6 weeks after I started playing, I posted this piece of art on Facebook:

(More information about the art is available here.)

People responded. Unbeknownst to me, I had a variety of friends who wanted to play, used to, but didn't have anyone to play with anymore. He Who Tells Stories was so excited that he brought his board and stones along to a beach bonfire. Suppressing the social anxiety, and extremely aware that I had no idea what I was doing, he and I hunkered down in the sand and played my first 19x19 game. Despite not knowing what we were doing, either, the rest of our bonfire party gathered round, creating a tableau of people more interested in the game a few feet away than the slowly dying bonfire we were all nominally there to attend. One of our friends had played against an AI for a while, oh, about 4 years ago, which made him the local expert and commentator. Others struggled to remember what they'd picked up from Hikaru no Go. We welcomed tasty interruptions in the form of charred brats and s'mores from the spectators. As the sun set over the ocean and the night grew steadily darker, our game carried on under flashlights and headlamps.

Sometime in the mid-game, I tried to stand up and stumbled, kicking sand and scattering the stones. Nooooo! Only then did we snap out of it and return to the fire at hand. Even so, I don't think I could have asked for a more idyllic setting or better company for my first real (half) game.