The American Go E
-Journal
is covering the 29th annual World
Amateur
Go Championship this week in Tokyo, Japan. Top amateurs from
68 countries are competing in the 8-round
tournament. Watch the AGA website
for real-time updates – including event reports, photos
and game records – as well as special WAGC editions of the EJ
this week. Unless otherwise
noted, all reporting is by EJ Managing Editor Chris Garlock and
photographs are by John Pinkerton.ARGENTINA LEADING TOPSY-TURVY FIELD AT WAGC: Dark horse Argentina has vaulted into the lead in this year’s World Amateur Go Championships, edging out top seeded Korea, while 16th-ranked Luxembourg and 11th-ranked Hong Kong have nudged aside both China and Japan. In a highly-anticipated showdown, Korea’s Sung Bong Ha defeated Yuzheng Guo of China in Round 5 Friday morning, while Fernando Aguilar (l) defeated Frank Janssen of the Netherlands. Aguilar then beat Laurent Heiser of Luxembourg in Round 6 Friday afternoon to give him a 3-point SOSOS lead over Korea and setting up a 7th-round head-to-head with Korea on Saturday morning. Aguilar has competed in the WAGC six times and finished 5th in 1982. Mozheng
Guan of
the US defeated Antonio
Fernandez Caballero in Round 5 but lost by 2.5 points to 15-year-old
Nai San Chan of Hong Kong in Round 6 for a 4-2 result thus far with two
final rounds to play on Saturday. There’s been a lot of
movement in the top seeds this year, with Luxembourg moving up from
16th to 3rd in the rankings, Hong Kong jumping from 11th to 4th, China
slipping from 1st to 5th, Japan dropping from 3rd to 7th and Thailand
moving up from 29th to 10th. Click here for complete
results and game
records. Click here for online
albums of photos from Thursday
and Friday
VT ORGANIZER DROPS BY: Vermont go organizer Peter Schumer turned up at the WAGC this week with his 18-year-old daughter Amy. “This is a great way to combine a cultural experience for her with an opportunity for me to see the World Amateurs,” Schumer told the EJ Thursday afternoon. Although his daughter – who just finished her first year in college -- doesn’t play, “she knows the rules well enough to beat me in a game on a 9x9 board we played downstairs” at the Nihon Ki-in, Schumer said. He spotted several homeless players
engrossed in a game while he and his daughter were exploring Tokyo
earlier in the week and snapped this shot (r).WAGC SNAPSHOTS: Frank Janssen, Go Player: “I’m always fine when I’m in Japan,” Frank Janssen (l) of The Netherlands told the EJ Friday morning when we bumped into him at the green tea dispenser. “It’s the only place I can just be a go player,” the manager of the European Go Center in Amsterdam said. He was in the early stages of what would turn out to be a ferocious 5th-round battle with Fernando Aguilar of Argentina, but Janssen was relaxed as we sipped our paper cups of the green brew that fuels this tournament. He was reminded of a character in the 2005 film “Sky High,” a son of superhero parents who has no super powers himself but who proudly introduces himself as “Ron Wilson, bus driver” and said “That’s me when I’m here; ‘Frank Janssen, go player’” He laughed happily and returned to the battle.
COMPLETELY ADDICTED TO THE GAME: Matthew Macfadyen (r) once drove 24 hours
non-stop to play go. It was February of 1979 and “On a whim,
a couple of us got in a beat-up car and drove to Prague,”
Macfadyen, the UK rep to the WAGC, told the E-Journal Wednesday night
over dinner. A couple of years later, when his request for paid leave
to attend the WAGC was denied, Macfadyen quit his job as a
meteorologist and went to Tokyo anyway. “It takes a certain
amount of obsessive dedication to get to the top,” the 6-dan
said cheerfully. Go is an obsession the 54-year-old has been pursuing
for over forty years. “I don’t think I’d
know how to conduct my life without playing go,” Macfadyen
admitted as he took another bite of crispy tempura. “I mean,
if I’m in a room with a go problem book, I have to pick it up
and take a look at it.” Between rounds here at the WAGC
– where he’s been a regular contestant going back
to the beginning of the 29-year-old event – if he’s
not chatting with old go pals he’s making new ones by
enthusiastically leaping into the nearest game review. “The
game of go is just a part of who I am.” If Macfadyen can be
accused of obsession, however, it’s really with life itself.
The frizzy-headed, snaggle-toothed Energizer Bunny who’s been
a fixture at countless go events – he’s won the
British Championship 21 times and four European Championships in the
1980’s is also an avid bird-watcher, maintains an interest in
old card games by traveling the backwaters of Europe searching out old
players and sings in a community choir in Warwick, England. For over 20
years he’s been exploring England’s extensive canal
system with a small group of mathematician friends who bought and
rebuilt an old canal boat. He’s an Oxford-bred electrician
with a degree in physics. “It helps me get the wires where
they’re supposed to go,” he laughs. Macfadyen has
some interesting theories about go involving neural pathways and
estimates that he’s played out over 20,000 professional
games, the old-fashioned way on an actual go board.
“It’s what’s given me a rather extensive
vocabulary of shape,” he says. His wife Kirsty, a shodan, is
his Pair Go partner and co-host of their local go club every Thursday
night. He doesn’t blame recent declines in UK club and
tournament turnout on online go. “I don’t see the
complete addiction to the game that my mates and I had, where
we’d drive up to
London and play all weekend. It doesn’t really matter what
you do in life as long as you do it to the limit.”WELCOMING IRISH READERS: We’re very pleased to welcome the members of the Irish Go Association as EJ readers this week and took the opportunity to chat with Ireland’s WAGC rep, Ian Davis (l). Davis is probably better-known to legions of online players as javaness, an administrator on KGS, and recently he became the EJ’s Irish correspondent. The 29-year-old 1-dan has been playing for seven years, though he had a 3-year layoff when there were no players available. He picked up the game again when he was working in Cambridge, where there’s a strong club, and now plays regularly in Belfast, where he’s a computer programmer. “We’re having a bit of a mini boom in Irish go at the moment,” Davis says, “we now have four tournaments a year, up from just one.” The tournaments are organized by the country’s four go clubs in Belfast, Galway, Cork and Dublin. Most Irish players are kyu players, Davis reports, perhaps because “Our clubs tend to meet in pubs and involve beer. “We do have Chinese 3- and 5-dans, who have really helped to grow the Cork club.” Lately there’s also been an influx of Eastern European players who have come to work in Ireland, Davis says, bringing strong new blood to the Irish go scene.
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