Unless you're some crazy genius, I am pretty sure that everybody who starts playing loses. A lot. There is a reason that we tell beginners to lose their first 100 games as soon as possible.
This got me curious on what other peoples first games were like.
As for me, I could have just gone to the father of my friend and asked him to teach me, but I was too socially incapable and decided to just play online. But not the big servers like KGS or IGS, those were too intimidating. I chose for the small server that (at the time) only had about 20-30 players online at any given time.
FlyOrDie.
For anybody unfamiliar with FlyOrDie, it is an online games website that also has a small go server. Additionally, I would say it might very well be the worst place to play your first games. At that time the only board size available was 15x15 and no komi (not that the komi would've made a difference).
Anyway, those 100 games were lost very, very quickly in quite horrible ways.
They weren't teaching games (honestly, my opponents also had no idea what they were doing, I just knew even less) and there was no review options or anything like that. So I learned by having my mistakes punished over and over again.
I did become stronger after a while, but I accumulated a lot of bad habits that I am still trying to get over.
My first teaching game was when I slipped to my friend that I had been playing every now and then and she told her dad who then invited me for a game. I played two games with him (and he gave me a self-made board he had left, which I still treasure), but then I stopped playing again for quite a while and it just never came up again. Regardless, I learned more in those two games than from any of my games online.
It's not that I think the way I learned how to play is very bad, because you'll have to get through that 'losing phase' anyway, but some guidance can make a big difference.
So those were my first games. What were your first games like?
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