Golf is ridiculous in every way, but you can spend silly money if you insist on the finest quality Japanese Go equipment. A flawless
matsume kaya-wood
floor goban will cost anything up to $60,000, the finest slate (black) and shell (white) stones up to $2,000, and Mikura mulberry bowls to hold the stones about $2,000. Why so expensive? Strong demand, and limited scope to increase supply.
Kaya trees take 600+ years to grow, and are now rare and tightly regulated owing to over-cutting in the past. Even once you have the wood, it has to be seasoned for years before use. The Japanese clams from whose shells the white stones are cut, are close to fished-out, and the clams of Baja Mexico, which are imported as a substitute, are heading in the same direction. Cutting and polishing the stones is a slow, labour-intensive process, and only about 10% of the total production of shell stones are of the highest "snow" quality. Mikura island, from which the finest mulberry wood for bowls is considered to come, was badly affected by a nearby volcanic eruption, and the wood is now very hard to come by.
We Chinese are more pragmatic. We tend to play on much thinner
table boards, often made of woods that the Japanese regard as very down-market. Our finest stones, the famous
Yunzi (云子 pronounced roughly ooin-tzuh; never
ever yun-zee), are manufactured, using a process somewhat like glass-making, by
casting molten material on an iron plate (this is why Chinese stones are traditionally flat on the underside rather than bi-convex like the meticulously ground and polished Japanese ones). Traditionally we store our stones in
small straw baskets instead of beautiful wooden bowls. As China gets richer, however, fancier equipment is becoming more popular.
You can buy Go equipment of many different quality levels, and you can get something nice for not much money. Just stay away from the nasty, much-too-small folding boards they sell in a lot of high-street and shopping-mall game shops, and don't expect spending more to make you a stronger player. Only hard work can do that. If you want to spend money, spend it on books...
Perhaps there's some sort of online version against an AI that I can pick up and put down as needed until I have the patience to play real people....
There are several well-established "environments" of clients and servers where you can play Go. English-speakers tend to favour
KGS which is a "closed" proprietary set-up, but it is free, and easy to install and get on-line.
IGS/Pandanet is another system, which is "open" in the sense that you can obtain many different clients that conform to the IGS protocols, and many Go-playing programs incorporate a built-in client. IGS is a little less friendly to people who only read and write English. Finally there is
Tygem, which I don't really recommend unless you are competent in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. If you prefer to play in a slower-paced "correspondence Go by e-mail" style, there is
Dragon Go Server, which has a web interface.
All these servers offer AI "bots" for you to play against. Computer opponents can provide good practice for beginners, but don't rely on them entirely, because they will teach you bad habits. You can find yourself winning by "gaming" the AI's quirks rather than developing real strength. Many Go servers have "Beginner's rooms" where you can find fellow noobs, and, I will admit, the occasional sandbagging douche-bag who gets off on beating up weaker players. Sadly, the internet is always the internet.
