Pair Go at Christmas in Brisbane

(December 21, 2008 at 8:00 pm by aguido in Events, Tournaments)

The Brisbane go club‘s Christmas party for 2008 was held yesterday at our usual stomping grounds, the Queensland Contract Bridge Centre. We had a nice healthy lunch (Subway and watermelon and cookies) and then played Australia’s first pair go tournament, just because.

The tournament was three rounds of go on thirteen-by-thirteen boards, run as a single division. The teams were:

• Chulho Rhee 5d and Peter Hexel 18k (first place)
• Jae-Wan Lee 2d and Fumiko Hulme 8k (second place)
• John Hardy 2d and Kei Nakagawa 7k (third place)
• Chris Zhao 2d and Nozomi Nakagawa 9k (fourth place)
• Sam Nakagawa 2d and Takao Fujimori 5k (fifth place)
• Jason Mackay 2d and Rodney Topor 3k (sixth place)
• Jack Xu 3d and Justin Lee 9k (seventh place)
• Rene Hexel 2d and, um, Horatio Davis 5k (wooden spoon)

The prize was a box of chocolate for each half of the winning pair. Mr Rhee and Dr Hexel were kind enough to share the loot with the rest of the club.

The pairing and draw were tuned for social go, which mean that the teams had to be paired up to be within four stones’ strength of each other to have a competitive single division. Slide pairing was used throughout, with Swiss pairing for the draw. Kudos to Amelia Gray, who slaved over a hot spreadsheet all afternoon, and Jason Mackay who helped her make reality match the spreadsheet.

Rounds were nominally forty minutes main time with ten minutes per side byoyomi. In practice, as club treasurer John Hardy remarked during the prolonged death agonies of round three, “This was not such a bad idea, but perhaps we should’ve used clocks.”

No kifu, but Sam Nakagawa and John Hardy took some interesting pictures, shown above.

Update: “The organisers used mysterious incantations, plus smoke and mirrors to calculate the handicaps. The losers consoled themselves with food and drink.” – the Brisbane Go Club‘s official take on the afternoon. :)