Many chess players who discover go seem to leave chess behind, but notable Swedish grandmaster Tiger Hillarp Person , the author of “Tiger’s Modern,” finds go to be a nice complement to his enjoyment of chess. Persson recently started blogging at “Chess at the Bag of Cats,” where he has set up a go section. He writes: “I started out with Go in the beginning of 2011 and, after a rapid rise to about 9kyu, I’ve been gaining around 4kyu a year since then. I can really recommend chess players to do this for a number of reasons. First, if you are too tactically inclined a player, then by playing Go you will be forced to think about things like ‘structure’ and ‘plans’. Secondly, if you work as a coach, reliving the struggle of being a beginner at a difficult game (like Chess – or Go) will definitely improve your understanding of those you are coaching. Thirdly, there are few things that let you appreciate the ‘nature’ of what you have learned as a chess player. Learning Go will make it obvious that you know stuff that transcends the chess board.” -Roy Laird, with thanks to Michael Bacon for sending the link.
Though he is a 7-time European Go Champion, the first Russian player to achieve professional rank and currently considered one of Europe’s finest players, Alexandre Dinerchtein 3p (“breakfast” on KGS) keeps his accomplishments in perspective.
Though go resources have expanded, the thing Dinerchtein would like to see most in the future is more “serious” interaction between top European and U.S. players. Except for his game with Michael Redmond 9P in 2001, he has never played any top U.S. players in an official event. As for recent U.S.-European events, he said, “I saw the matches between Lee Sedol and U.S. pros (and European pro Taranu), but I don’t think that they were interesting enough” because they were “novelty” fast games. He’d like to see the 