“On Thursday 12th March I was working in the garden for many hours and I knew my country was going to be in a quarantine soon,” says tournament founder and organizer Lukas Podpera, setting the scene for the tournament’s inception. “Many live tournaments had already been cancelled, therefore I started to think about ideas, what could I do for the Go community. And one of the ideas was to run an online tournament, originally planned only for Czechia, maybe Central Europe.” Originally hoping to gather about 100 participants, news of the tournament spread through international Facebook groups, prompting Podpera to send invitations to all EGF associations. “Corona Cup is an online tournament in the times of coronavirus crisis, when tournaments are cancelled around Europe and most of the Go clubs are not meeting. I’m trying to make it look as much as a live tournament as possible.”
Podpera and his team are using Google Docs to post pairings and disseminate information. The tournament will be a total of six rounds over the next three months, with paired players given a week to meet on their own time to play in the Corona Cup 2020 room on KGS and report results. The tournament is sponsored by Jena International Go School and supported by the Czech association who will also publish registration and results. Over 350 players have registered so far, including three professionals. “You can see that many European top players are participating,” says Podpera, “but I hope I can get a good result myself even in this kind of competition!”
