American Go E-Journal » 2010 » November

WON SUK SUH 5D WINS MOON CHA MEMORIAL

Saturday November 20, 2010

Won Suk Suh 5d topped a field of 19 at the 2010 Moon Cha Memorial Go/Weiqi/Baduk Tournament November 13 in Rockville, MD. The tournament is named after Moon Cha, a DC area go player who passed away in September 2003. A theoretical physicist with the Naval Surface Weapons Center in White Oak MD, Moon Cha had a major influence on the local, national, and international go communities, mentoring generations of area go players. Winner’s Report: First Section (Open): 1st: Won Suk Suh 5d; 2nd: James Park 5 d; 3rd: Juan Pablo Quizon 5d; 4th: Keith Arnold 4d; 5th: Zhenying Gu 5d. Second Section (Handicap): 1st: Todd Blatt 1k; 2nd: Joseph Contarino 2d; 3rd: Samuel Zimmerman 5k. The tournament is a fundraiser supporting the Rockville Sister City Corporation and promoting public awareness of go.
– Justin Teng (l) plays Juan Pablo Quizon; photo by John Goon

Categories: U.S./North America

LIU WINS N.A. BC CARD CUP QUALIFIER

Monday November 15, 2010

Andy Liu 7D (r) defeated Curtis Tang, Eric Lui and Hugh Zhang in the November 13-14 North American BC Card Cup qualifier. Liu will be the U.S. representative at the third BC Card Cup, which will be held in Korea in January 2011. The qualifier was held on KGS and nearly 400 watched the final match online. Click here for complete results. Sponsored by Korea’s leading credit card company, the BC Card Cup features a strong field, including Korean insei. Liu was the 2006 US Open champion and 2009 NAIM champion and has clearly been maintaining his go strength while studying at New York University. “Mid-January is a good time,” Liu told the E-Journal, confident in his upcoming performance in Korea.
CREDITS: Online associate TD’s: Yixian Zhou 7d, Binquan Wang 5d, Wei Sun 5d, Yue Zhang 7d. KGS Go Server. N.A. BC Card Cup TD: Zhiyuan ‘Edward’ Zhang. photo by John Pinkerton

Categories: U.S./North America

YE AND QU SWEEP NORCAL MONTHLY

Monday November 15, 2010

Twenty nine players got in a nice day of face-to-face go at the November monthly ratings tournament this past Saturday in Palo Alto, CA. The highest-ranked player was a 10-year-old 5-dan visiting from China. Aaron Ye 3d led the dan division with four wins and no losses, and Larry Qu 5k led the kyu division, also with four wins and no losses. Justin Shieh 4d, Kersam Liu 2d, Jay Chan 3k, Kfir Dolev 3k, Sile Chen 4k, Roger Schrag 5k, Eric Tran 7k, and Ciaran Fitzgerald 19k picked up three wins apiece. “We signed up seven new AGA members and got three expired members to renew their AGA membership,” reports tournament organizer Roger Schrag. Next month’s Bay Area Go tournament will take place December 11 in Menlo Park, CA. Photo by Lisa Schrag

Categories: U.S./North America

GO PHOTO: Sasaski in LA

Monday November 15, 2010

Tadashi Sasaki 8P at one of his events in Los Angeles last week. photo by Samantha Davis

Categories: Go Photos

PANDANET’S “BIG BANG” EXPLODES ON EUROPEAN GO SCENE

Monday November 15, 2010

Three hundred players from 29 countries — the strongest tournament ever played in Europe – will participate in the Pandanet Go European Team Championship beginning next week. “This is the greatest push ever seen on the European go scene,” says European Go Federation President Martin Stiassny. “Everyone who knows the European go scene and looks at the players in the A League and B League is overwhelmed” by the number of top players. Strong European players are eligible to play in the tournament, which is a 9-round team tournament in three leagues played on Pandanet IGS with the finals set for the 2011 European Go Congress 2011 in Bordeaux, France. The prize pool is 10,000 euros and the first round is set for November 23rd on IGS – where spectators worldwide will be able to follow the games — but before a single stone has been played, Stiassny says that “It’s already a success, with 29 out of 36 possible countries represented.” Click here for tournament info and news, and here for details on how the tournament is organized. THIS JUST IN! (11/20) The Pandanet Go European Team Championship will be played in a special room on IGS called EuropeanTeamChamp. The first games are scheduled for Sunday, November 21 at 8p (UTC+1). Click here for all Round 1 pairings (14 country-matches on four boards).

Categories: Europe

BERLIN GO-WEEK LAUNCHES FRIDAY

Monday November 15, 2010

The annual Berlin Go-week kicks off this Friday in Germany and features two major tournaments and lectures by top professionals. The Go to Innovation tournament runs November 19-21 and features a 3,000-euro prize pool and top players including Seok-Bin Cho 7d, In-Seong Hwang 7d, Viktor Lin 5d and Javier-Aleksi Savolainen 5d. Board 1 games will be broadcast live by EuroGoTV on KGS. Next week there will be a “super mega simul” as well as lectures by Sung-Ji Hong 8P (photo; he defeated Sedol Lee 9P and Changho Yi 9P recently), Young-Sun Yoon 8P and Ju-Yeon Ko 8P. Young-Sun Yoon 8P will do commentary on the 2010 Berlin Championship final, broadcast by EuroGoTV live on KGS. The Kranich tournament, one of the biggest tournaments in Germany, wraps up Berlin Go-week, and includes commentary by strong players like Young-Sun Yoon 8P, a party, calligraphy course, sushi and an Empty Triangle stand.
– Harry Weerheijm, EuroGoTV

Categories: Europe

GO PLAYING TEEN WINS SIEMEN’S PRIZE

Monday November 15, 2010

A striking advance in mathematical game theory earned top honors for the team of James Pinkerton 1d (l), and Rafael Setra (r) in the recent Region Five Finals of the 2010-11 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology, a premier science research competition for high school students. Pinkerton, an avid go player, and Setra are seniors at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland. Their win in the team category has scored them a $6,000 scholarship for their mathematics project, The Duplicator-Spoiler Game for an Ordinal Number of Turns. Their math research might be analogized to mirror go–the players, a spoiler and a duplicator alternate turns, choosing elements from two sets until the duplicator is unable to mirror the spoiler’s move.

In the math, the number of turns for the spoiler to win tells you about the complexity of statements in mathematical logic needed to differentiate the sets. Traditionally the games have a finite number of turns and their research extended the games to arbitrary lengths over various infinite structures. “This team has made a striking extension of a game-theoretic interpretation of descriptive logic that dates back to the 1960s. Using it, they can distinguish between mathematical structures not separable by simple queries,” said competition judge Haynes Miller, Professor of Mathematics at MIT. “Their work has potential applications to resource allocation in designing search algorithms. What impressed me about these students was their clarity of thought. It’s a very confusing subject to work in and they found their way through it to a new frontier.”

Pinkerton is president of the Chess Club and a member of the National Honors Society and French Honors Society. Fluent in French, he single sculls on the Potomac and plays chess and go competitively. Pinkerton teaches chess as a volunteer in several programs in his county and in inner-city Washington, DC. He also teaches mathematics to underclassmen. He credits his father (E-J staff photographer John Pinkerton) who taught him “fun mathematics, not the dreary algebra of secondary school,” with nurturing his love for the subject. Pinkerton would like to study mathematics in college and to become a university professor. Setra was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and moved to the US when he was eight years old. He speaks Portuguese and Spanish and is part of Operation Fly, National Honors Society and the Martial Arts Club. A volunteer at Viers Mill Elementary School, Setra plays Starcraft 2, non-competitive football and has just learned how to play go from Pinkerton. He would like to study mathematics, engineering and computer science and to become a college professor.

“Each year, the Siemens Foundation invites America’s high school students to make their mark in the world of science,” said Jeniffer Harper-Taylor, President of the Siemens Foundation. “We commend these students on rising to the challenge and pushing the envelope of scientific thought.” The students presented their research to a panel of judges from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), host of the Region Five Finals, on November 6th. Pinkerton and Setra will also be invited to compete at the National Finals in Washington, DC, December 3–6, 2010, where the winners of six regional competitions will vie for the $100,000 Grand Prize and national acclaim for extraordinary scientific achievement at the high school level.
–EJ Youth Editor Paul Barchilon, photo: James Pinkerton (l) and Rafael Setra (r), courtesy of the Siemens Foundation

Categories: U.S./North America,Youth

SASAKI WORKSHOPS A HIT IN NORCAL

Monday November 15, 2010

A total of 19 players ranging from 17 kyu to 2 dan attended a pair of one-day workshops recently with Tadashi Sasaki 8P in San Francisco and Menlo Park, CA. This was Sasaki’s first visit to Northern California in over 20 years, and he was pleased to finally get to ride the San Francisco cable cars. His last visit was shortly after the 1989 earthquake and the cable cars were not running. Each student got to play a teaching game with Sasaski, including review and analysis. The small class size each day allowed students to ask lots of questions and get individual attention. Click here for more photos. Asked what he enjoys doing when he isn’t playing go, Sasaski laughed and said “Teach go, of course.”
– photo by Paul Goodman

Categories: U.S./North America

ZHUANG TOPS YOUNG LIONS TOURNEY

Monday November 15, 2010

Vincent Zhuang 5d took top honors in the 2010 Young Lions Tournament on Saturday, November 6. Organized by the American Go Honor Society (AGHS), the tournament was held on KGS. More than sixty youth go players signed up for the tourney. There were four divisions: Dans, Low Kyus, Middle Kyus, and High Kyus. One of the participants described the tournament as “a hectic but fun experience” and another described it as the “highlight of my week.” More AGHS tournaments, including the annual School Teams Tournament, are in the works. AGHS Presidents Jack Ye and Jasmine Yan directed the tournament, and were assisted by Rebecca Cheng, Eric Chen, Tommy Liu, and Viral Kotecha. – Eric Chen and Jasmine Yan

Winner’s Report: Dan: 1^stplace, Vincent Zhuang 5d; 2^nd place, Andrew Lu 6d, 3^rd place: Yunxuan Li 3d , and Aaron Zhang 2d; Low Kyu (1k-5k) division: 1^st place, Jeremy Chiu 1k; 2^nd place, Jeffrey Yan 2k, 3^rd place, Kfir Dolev 2k, and Haisong Yang 5k; Middle Kyu (6k-10k) division: 1^st place, Justin Oh 6k; 2^nd place, Raymond Liu 10k; 3^rd place, Eugene Lee 9k, and Eric Chen 8k; High Kyu (11k-30k) division: Terry Luo 11k; 2^nd place, Daniel Zhang 12k; 3^rd place: Viral Kotecha 12k, and David Hao 17k.

Categories: U.S./North America,Youth

FIRST SPORTACCORD WORLD MIND GAMES SET FOR 2011

Thursday November 11, 2010

The first SportAccord World Mind Games will be held in Beijing, China, in September 2011. The brand-new event will feature top players from six mind-sport games — bridge, chess, draughts, go, Chinese chess, and duplicate poker — and was announced on November 10 by Hein Verbruggen, President of SportAccord. “This event is different from the World Mind Sport Games in that it features only a small field of top players, rather than the general representation from all nations as in WMSG,” says Thomas Hsiang, Vice President of the International Go Federation and Secretary General of the International Mind Sport Association, “it is also different from the current international go competitions such as the LG Cup or Fujitsu Cup in that the new event will include top Western players, women players, and youth representation.” The technical details will be worked out in the next few weeks, says Hsiang.

Categories: SportAccord World Mind Games,World

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