If Kellin Pelrine had immediately opened the Go board he received for Christmas in 2004 instead of late the following summer, he could have been eight months further advanced at the ancient Chinese board game than he is.
Not that it matters much.
Pelrine has already achieved the master ranking of 3 dan since he first took up the game 20 months ago, matching and exceeding the skill levels of the veteran players who taught him how to play.
“I taught Kellin how to play two years ago, and now when we play, he gives me a five-stone handicap,” said Paul Barchilon, a local ceramic artist who co-founded the Boulder Kids and Teens Go Club three years ago.
Oh, yeah, and Pelrine isn’t even a teenager yet.
“We have five kids that are very intense,” said David Weiss, a software engineer who founded the club with Barchilon. “You can’t teach that kind of passion.”
Weiss, who spent more than three decades acquiring the Go ranking Pelrine managed to reach in less than two years, said his victories over the 12-year-old, home-schooled Boulderite are fewer and farther between these days.
On Sunday, Pelrine won the regional qualifier of the U.S. Youth Go Championship at the Boulder Public Library, earning him a seat on a plane to Seattle next month for a shot at the finals championship.
The winner in Seattle goes on to represent the United States at the World Youth Amateur Championship, which is held inAugust.
“It’s a really interesting game,” Pelrine said, blinking and squirming in a chair between rounds of the game.
He faced Jessica Lin, 11, in the final round of the regional contest Sunday afternoon.
“I could tell she was concentrating much more than usual,” Pelrine said, after steadily moving his stones into the dominant positions on the board and claiming victory.
Go, first played in China more than 4,000 years ago and practically a national pastime there — as well as in Japan and Korea — is often compared to chess in terms of the strategy and forethought required to play it well.
But Go aficionados say the game is far more complex and variable than chess — easy to learn but exceedingly difficult to master.
“There are more possible games of Go than there are subatomic particles in the universe,” Barchilon said. “The placement of each stone on the board is crucial and can have a critical effect 40 moves down the line.”
Typically, Go is played by two people who alternately place black and white stones on a gridded board and attempt to surround and remove the other’s stones.
Whoever controls a larger portion of the board by the time the game ends wins.
Barchilon, 41, calls Go an antidote to videogames and the videogame culture of youth.
“It teaches concentration, balance and discipline — and respect for one’s opponent,” he said.
The Boulder Kids and Teens Go Club meets Sunday afternoons at the library and has about two dozen young people who play regularly.
“There’s a small number of people who play the game in this country, but they are very passionate,” Barchilon said.
Contact Camera Staff Writer John Aguilar at 303-473-1389 or aguilarj@dailycamera.com.
