In Japanese, Kyu is an amateur rank in Go, or anything else that has ranked steps, such as Karate, Aikido, Ikebana, or Shogi. The system starts at the lowest level, 30 kyu, really bad, to 1 kyu. Beyond that is the lowest Dan, known as shodan (firts dan). Dan levels go up to 9.

You can play for years and still be a kyu player.

In the original chinese system, the description of a 9 dan player was "God enters into his games".

In Korean Go, kyu is known as "gup", and it starts at 35, not 30.