I wandered, much like an Eskimo at a nude beach, into a Go tournament this week.

Go? Yeah, the ancient Chinese game of strategy, not the space on a Monopoly board.

In Go, two players compete for points by taking turns placing black and white pieces, called stones, on a tray-sized board with the markings of a vast grid.

Or so I'm told.

I didn't have a clue about Go when I showed up at the 23rd annual U.S. Go Congress, Go's eight-day version of March Madness.

Happy to answer questions, Go players practically took me by the hand and pulled me into their milieu. It wasn't long before they had me loosening up my parka.

About 500 players gathered in the activities center at Millersville University, some from as far away as Serbia and Japan.

The Go players I met are passionate about going nude, I mean playing Go, and they make doing it sound so natural. I mean appealing.

Proficiency levels

"It's the aesthetics that draw me to it," said Barry Pasicznyk, 45, of Philadelphia. "The patterns are very beautiful."

Sixteen-year-old Jack Yang of Bloomfield, N.J., who had a private tutor in Go when he was younger and living in China, said, "When I lose, I want to play again. I want to keep trying."

"You can compare Go," offered Paul Barchilon, 41, of Boulder, Colo., "to playing a musical instrument. You can study it all your life and still be learning."

Luck isn't in the vocabulary of Go players.

Go, like chess, is all about making smarter moves than your opponent.But don't make the mistake of comparing Go to chess. Where chess has a hierarchy of playing pieces, from pawn to king, Go pieces are all equal.

It's in the clever arrangement, interconnection and massing of one's homogenous stones that champions are born.

The rules are easy; playing well is not.

That's why I found Andrew Cupino, 25, a bright medical intern from Philadelphia, in a lounge reading "Fundamental Principles of Go," a paperback by Yi-lun Yang. In Go circles, Yang is a 7 Dan, the highest ranking for a Go amateur.

A novice starts on the ground floor with a ranking of 30K. Rising through the 30 ranks of K to achieve a 1 Dan rating is like earning a black belt in martial arts. Instead of a belt, everyone at the Go Congress wears a name tag. Eyes immediately go to a stranger's ranking, not name. It's in the corner, in bold print.

A 6 or 7 Dan strides through the halls of the Go Congress like a god. Some mighty Dans will deign to play lowly K players, up to eight games at a time, moving from board to board.

Inscrutable skill

Cupino, who is an 8K, and Pasicznyk, less seasoned at 17K, each played a board against a 6 Dan.

"You feel impotent, and you just don't know what to do," Cupino recalled of the experience. "You can't make any points, and he takes these swaths of territory everywhere. But he never kills you. He's being nice. He's showing me what move I should have made, but he's not punishing me all the way. He's saying, 'Look at what I can get away with,' and he hints at all the other things he could get away with, but he holds back."

Still, Cupino said, "he slaughtered me."

After learning about Go in a Japanese comic book and playing the game the past six months, mostly online, 12-year-old Blair Chisholm of Laurel, Md., has progressed to 11K.

The game has become something of an obsession, Chisholm said, adding, "My one friend, she's getting kind of annoyed."

Chisholm's parents support her interest and brought her to the Congress, "not that they would try to play it," she said.

And where were they?

"They took my (7-year-old) sister to Dutch Wonderland," Chisholm said. "She thinks I'm crazy to stay here."

E-mail: jhawkes@lnpnews.com