Since January 11th 2024, Schachclub 1961 König Nied is the first chess club in Germany that also offers a regular club night for the Asian board game go.

Compared to chess, go is not as well-known in Germany, but in terms of strategic content and depth, it is easily its equal. Up until now, go is just rarely organized in clubs. There is the Deutscher Go-Bund, the national federation, which then oversees associations on federal state level. Club nights are normally held informally in restaurants or cafés.

By founding a go department, our club now offers go players from the region a safe haven. As of now, operations are preliminary. Should attendence be satisfactory, the goal is to make the support of go a permanent feature of our club by acknowledging it in the statute.

After a promising, well attended start and a haul of new members that covers the cost, this goal should surely be within reach.

And so the circle closes, which began with the mission of the German engineer Oskar Korschelt to Japan after its opening in 1868. Korschelt considered Go to be the equal of chess, and Emanuel Lasker, the world champion of chess from 1894 to 1921, was very fond of go himself as well.

And thus we believe that supporting go will be a win for our club. For further details, we would like to refer to the article of Benjamin Wirthmann, himself vice president of the German Go Federation, who drove the founding of the go department alongside Oliver Uwira in no small way.