A few simple rules ... limitless possibilities

Myungwan Kim 9P, Yilun Yang 7P, Mingjiu Jiang 7P, and Jennie Shen 2p have confirmed they will be teaching at the US Go Congress in Tacoma this year.  Co-Director Chris Kirschner reports: “Pros from Korea, China, and both Kansai Ki-in and Nihon Ki-in in Japan will attend, but we aren’t sure of the names yet.” Korea also plans to send two additional pros to the Teacher Workshop. See the What’s Happening link on the Congress Website for more details and frequent updates.

The Galway Go Club is pleased to announce the FOURTH GALWAY GO TOURNAMENT at the Bridge Club St Mary’s Road Galway City on 8-9 June 2013.
This is a 5 round McMahon tournament with 50min time limit, 20sec per move overtime (3 times) and 6.5 Komi. Tea, coffee and biscuits will be provided. Everyone is welcome! Loads of prizes!
For full details click here.

One hundred go players converged on Praha on the weekend of May 4 and 5 for the 42nd International Prague Tournament, better known as the Sixth Korean Amabasador Cup. They came from Austria, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, Slovakia, Switzerland, and all over Czechia. The top Czech players turned out in force, but it was Slovak champion Pavol Lisy who emerged unbeaten from the five rounds to win the cup. In the last two rounds Pavol defeated Czechia's Go Baron Ondrej Silt and youth champion Lukas Podpera. Ondrej and Lukas both defeated fellow Czech Jan Hora, who took fourth place. Pavol and Jan defeated Austrian Viktor Lin, who finished fifth, and it was Ondrej and Jan Hora who downed European Champion Jan Simara, consigning him to sixth place. Czechia's Stepan Hrbek (10 kyu) equalled Pavol's feat by winning all five of his games and took 47th place in the McMahon standings.

Complete results are here.

by John Power,  Japan Correspondent for the American Go E-Journal

Cho U keeps sole lead in the Meijin League: Two important games in the 38th Meijin League were played on May 2. In one, Cho U 9P (W) beat Mizokami Tomochika 8P by resignation; in the other, Iyama Yuta Kisei (B) beat Sakai Hideyuki 8-dan, also by resignation. As a result, Cho improved his score to 5-0 and kept the sole lead. Iyama is in second place, on 5-1. The two are scheduled to play each other in June. The only other player with one loss is Hane Naoki, who is on 4-1. However, he has a bye in May.

Two more games were played on May 9. Takao Shinji 9P (W) beat Murakawa Daisuke 7P by resignation and Kono Rin 9P beat Yuki Satoshi Judan, also by resignation.  These results meant that Takao and Kono both kept their hopes of winning the league alive, as each has only two losses (Takao is 4-2 and Kono is 3-2). Neither has played Cho yet, so they need to “cooperate” to drag him down. Of course, they need Iyama to stumble as well. Incidentally, Yuki’s jinx continues: he has now lost 15 games in a row over three Meijin legues. Photo: Cho U, Official Nihon Ki-in photo.

Kisei Leagues starts: The 38th Kisei Leagues got off to a start with a game in the A League. Taking black, Yamashita Keigo Meijin beat Yoda Norimoto 9P by 5.5 points.

Honinbo title match starts on 16th: The big game later this week will be the first game of the 68th Honinbo title match, in which Takao Shinji 9P is challenging Iyama Yuta Honinbo. The game will be played on May 16 & 17. Takao has a dismal record against Iyama of 5 wins to 17 losses, but he was in superb form in the Honinbo League, which he won 7-0, so the title match is unlikely to be one-sided.

Professional Pair Go championship: The E-Journal reported on this tournament on May 6th. The Japanese Pair Go Association would like to add some details about the event. The official name of the tournament is the 1st China-Japan-Korea Professional Pair Go Championship. It is notable as the first purely professional international Pair Go tournament.  The first tournament in which professionals took part was the Pair Go World Cup 2010, which was held in Hangzhou, China. It was organized by the World Pair Go Association, and a total of 16 professional and amateur players took part.  This tournament was popular with spectators and go fans. This year’s event was organized by the WPGA with the cooperation of the Chinese Weiqi Association, Anhui Province and Hefei City. Matsuura Koichiro, President of the WPGA and former Director-General of Unesco, attended the tournament to give out prizes. A large number of photos and the game records can be found at the home pages of the Japan Pair Go Association and on the Pandanet page for the tournament. Photo: Pair Go Winners, representing China, Wang Chenxing 5-dan & Chang Hao 9-dan. From Pandanet.

“The heavyweight pros on late-night cable television boast nicknames such as Monster, Razor, Butcher, Assassin and Knitting Needle. The most famed matches in history include the Blood Vomiting Game of 1835, the Famous Killing Game of 1926 and the Atomic Bomb Game of 1945. No, this is not some bone-crushing contact sport. It is a simple parlour game where two opponents, comfortably seated and often equipped with nothing more than folding paper fans and cigarettes, take turns placing little stones, some black, some white, on a flat wooden grid…”
- excerpted from the December 16, 2004 report  on “The most intellectually testing game ever devised?” in The Economist; thanks to Glen Peters for passing it along. Photo Getty Images, courtesy The Economist

This year, the Belfast Open will take place on the 26th and 27th of October, in Belfast Boat Club
See the webpage for full details.

Also, don’t forget about the upcoming Galway event.

May 18: Raleigh, NC
Carolina Spring Tournament
Owen Chen owenjchen@gmail.com 919-468-2062

May 18: San Francisco, CA
Bay Area Go Players Association AGA Ratings Tournament
Roger Schrag rs1249@bayareago.org 510-501-2701
Steve Burrall sburrall@comcast.net 916-688-2858

May 19: Seattle, WA
Iwamoto Youth 19×19 Tournament
Brian Allen manager@seattlego.org 206-545-1424 206-632-1122

May 18-19: AGA Tournament Room, KGS
OWL: Resurrection – NAMT Qualifier
Karoline Burrall karoline.burrall@usgo.org

Get the latest go events information.

I have been teaching go for several years, many people may know of my Youtube channel, “Clossius” where I have done video lessons for beginners. I am offering teaching games and lessons for donations, to anyone who would be willing to help me get to the Go Congress this year.  -Shawn Ray, AGA 4d. Interested parties may contact Shawn at Clossius.ShawnRay@gmail.com

“The Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience will be assisting us to present items of significance to the history of go in this country,” reports Congress Director Chris Kirschner. “We  will have a collection of AGA Journals from the 1940′s and 50′s. Japanese players in Seattle have donated old books dating back to the early 1920′s, including some that were hand written during the wartime internment. Copies of some of these will be available for purchase at the Go Congress.” Also on display will be a floor board and stones, along with a doll that traveled West from Japan about 1900, to Austria, and continued from Europe about 1950, landing in Seattle ultimately.

“We will  have a piece by well known Japanese calligrapher Taiun Yanagida, stating 10 rules for playing well,” said Kirschner. “It was a feature at the original Seattle Go club in Seattle’s international district, which was a chapter of the Nihon Ki-in. It was donated to the Seattle Go Center by surviving members of that club shortly after the Go Center was founded in 1995. A translation will be available.  Copies of early books in English will make an interesting comparison with our modern book style,” adds Kirschner. The organizers are looking for additional display material.  If you have material you would like to see displayed , contact Kirschner at director2013@gocongress.org. -Paul Barchilon. 

In Russia, they take their mind sports seriously. Case in point: the Russian Sports Federation’s (RSF) chess program has produced many of the world’s finest players. Similarly, the RSF’s go program has produced top Western professionals through their partnership with the Hankuk Kiwon, producing players such as Alexander Dinerchtein 3P (“breakfast” on KGS) and Svetlana Shikshina 3P, and continues to produce promising up-and-comers such as Ilya Shikshin 7D.

If asked to name their mentors, all would certainly mention Valery Shikshin, an Honored Trainer of the Russian Federation (and as you may gather, father of both Svetlana and Illya). Shikshin has been teaching and coaching Russian go for 25 years, and has developed a set of axioms and principles that he sets forth in this four-volume “Theory and Practice Series,” now available exclusively in the US through GoGameGuru. Volume 1, The Theory and Practice of Tsumego, includes more than 300 original life-and-death problems, many from Russian master games. Starting with the basic shapes, Shikshin takes the reader all the way through corner positions, side formations, and on into the intricacies of seki and ko. I found the chapter on seki to be uniquely systematic in its understanding of how these strangely symbiotic shapes arise.

While Volume 1 of “Theory and Practice” is a new approach to an area that has been widely studied, Volume 2 — “The Theory and Practice of Semeai“ — is surely unique in English. Here Shikshin takes the same systematic approach to capturing races, illustrating a few dozen basic principles with numerous problems and game examples. As in Volume 1, the principles are illustrated by hundreds of problems and examples, many from actual games. Two other volumes will complete the series in the next few months – The Theory and Practice of Shapes, and The Theory and Practice of Analysis. These materials helped to produce some great Western go masters – they are surely a worthy entry into the Western go canon.
- Roy Laird