Go players of New Zealand,
The 2003 Otago Open Championship was held in Dunedin recently. Here is an excellent report on the event by its organiser and host, Graeme Parmenter…
Otago
Open Championship 2003
The Otago Open Go Championship was revived this year after a ten year break. On the 20-21 September, seventeen players gathered in Dunedin for the 7th Otago Open. Steve and Colin came all the way from Auckland, the Yuans from Hamilton, and out of the cultural black hole of Queenstown, came Lou and P.J. From Dunedin there was a remarkable gaggle of 1-dans, ranging from the venerable Matt Woods and Paul Yates to Leon Phease who was about the size of a go stone when the tournament began in 1988. Jerry Joffe has recently arrived from Ohio with a strong Japanese influence, and the terrible twins Corrin and Ciarin, the latter having reached shodan in less than a year, were there to cause the usual mayhem. Add to that the veterans Barry and Graeme and it was a humdinger of a dan section. Missing was Yu Cong Phease, three time winner of the tournament, who was on nappy duty for the weekend.
It took only until round two for Jimmy Yuan to declare his genius with a sound thrashing of Barry. Graeme was next to get Jimmied so that by the end of round 3, Jimmy was the only unbeaten player. And that’s the way he stayed. He is a wonderful talent with an ease in his play that comes from a lot of play and study.
In the kyu players section handicap games were played because of the wide spread in ranks and everyone had at least one win. This section was won by Max Yuan, making it a clean sweep for the family. Young Edwin Phease (7) showed he is closing on 1-dan fast and Lou was an advertisement for the soundness of technique encouraged by the Many Faces of Go, his only opponent for many years.
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6 dan club
Roman
Pozaroczyk is having a purple patch. He's 1 win from 6 dan in the
Auckland book. His latest victim was Colin Grierson on 2 stones...
Sun Quan, a computer science student, is starting a Go club at Waikato University. So if you know anyone in Hamilton who would like to play go at a club, get them to contact Quan at quan_sun@xtra.co.nz.
Bruce Wilcox and his wife Sue are in New Zealand for the next couple of weeks, scouting for the possibility of moving here. Bruce has been known to the go world for many years: he is the author of numerous go-playing computer programs (most notably Ego and Nemesis, based on “instant go” theory) and the book “EZ Go: Oriental strategy in a nutshell”.
KGS is planning another online competition. It will start on 25th October and run for 6 weeks. Details are available at http://www.igoweb.org/~kgsteams/KGS_Teams.html. Anyone interested in being part of the KiwiGo team (5 players) should contact Steve Taylor (tayste@clear.net.nz).
The
2nd Toyota and Denso Cup will be held in Brisbane 16th - 18th
January 2004. The organisers will pay the airfare, accommodation and
expenses for one New Zealand representative. The NZGS committee
is discussing the best method to use for selecting the NZ player –
probably based on the same points system we use to select a player to
attend the WAGC each year. More information on the event can be
found on the internet at www.uq.net.au/~zzjhardy/toyotacup.html.
One of the diversions at the Otago champs was Kreig Spiel. That's where you can see only your own stones, and a referee keeps track of both sides. The ref tells you about atari (although not which particular stone or group is in atari), suicides and captures, or if you try to play where an opponent's stone is already. With the latter case, you can start to get some information about where the opponent's stones are. The game is surpisingly unlike Go - more like a war game (hence the name, I guess). You can suddenly find that a large group is in atari, without having had any prior warning! This picture is the final situation of my game against Jimmy – although the picture doesn't do justice to the process of playing the game….
And remember, “Don’t peep where you can cut”.
Dan