Learn Go to a 15 kyu rating in twelve months
A year of daily practice — about 30 minutes a day — takes a complete beginner to a stable 15 kyu rating on a real Go server. Roughly 200 hours total. You will not be a strong player. Strong takes a decade. You will be able to play a real game and read it back afterward.
12 months · ~200 hours · 15 kyu on Online Go Server
1.Cho Chikun — Go: A Complete Introduction to the Game
Cho Chikun is one of the strongest Go players of the twentieth century, and his beginner book is the cleanest introduction in English. 138 pages. Rules, basic shapes, life and death, a few model games. Read it once, play fifty games on a 9x9 board, then read it again. Most beginner Go books are overstuffed; this one isn't.
~$15 in paperback from Kiseido
Go: A Complete Introduction to the Game →2.Online Go Server — daily play
Make a free OGS account. Play one 9x9 game a day for the first month, then move to 13x13, then 19x19 by month four. Take the automatic AI review of every loss seriously — it will show you the move that swung the game. OGS is community-supported, ad-free, and the only major server with correspondence games for people who can't sit still for an hour.
Free
Online Go Server →3.Nick Sibicky — Go Lectures
Sibicky teaches at the Seattle Go Center and recorded over 400 of his beginner-to-intermediate lectures on YouTube. Watch them in order starting from lecture one. He plays through real student games, calls out the same shape mistakes you keep making, and explains why pros play differently. Free, conversational, hundreds of hours, the closest thing to having a club teacher when you don't have a club.
Free
Nick Sibicky Go Lectures →If this doesn't fit you
If you have a local Go club, skip Sibicky and go to the club every week instead. Bring a paper board. Ask the strongest player there for a teaching game with handicap. One in-person teaching game from a 5 kyu beats five hours of YouTube. The American Go Association lists clubs in most major US cities.
Why this path
Go is the deepest board game humans play, and getting strong takes years — single-digit kyu typically takes two to four years of consistent study, and dan ranks take longer. The reward of the first year is small but real: you start to see the game. Cho Chikun gives you the rules and shapes, OGS gives you the reps and AI feedback, Sibicky gives you the running narration of someone who has watched thousands of beginner games. Tsumego (life-and-death problems) on OGS is the secret accelerator most beginners skip. Do them.