21 Dec 2008 1 Comment

Pair Go at Christmas in Brisbane

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.

Pair Go

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)

Pair go - two facing two

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 winning team at the 2008 Brisbane pair go tournament

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.

Fumiko at the 2008 Brisbane Christmas tournament

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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.”

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Not enough sugar
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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. :)

by aguido in Events, Tournaments Tags: , ,

04 Dec 2008 No Comments

Wu Shu Hao 3p visits Melbourne

The Australian 2008 national championships were held on the twenty-first to twenty-third of November, and Wu Shu Hao (a third dan professional from China) was invited to Brisbane for the tournament, to teach and referee. On his way through, he stopped in at the Melbourne University Students Playing Go club to visit. These are some pictures of what happened that day…

by aguido in Events Tags: , ,

27 Nov 2008 No Comments

How not to do it, part I

The last game of the last round of the kyu division at the 2008 Nationals. :)

by aguido in Other, Tournaments Tags: , ,

27 Nov 2008 No Comments

Prologue

This is a blog about go in Australia, from the point of view of the AGJ editorial staff.

I’m Horatio Davis, aguido on KGS, OGS, and DGS, Horatio at the Brisbane Go Club, and “Hey! You!” at various Australian tournaments. I’m the technical editor for the AGJ, which means I keep the site running, play tag with Adobe Creative Suite, and do most of the other things that do not require actual go knowledge around the Journal. This is just as well, as I’m far too busy playing go to actually improve. At the time of writing, I’m at fifth kyu strength, plus or minus two stones depending on my blood sugar level and opponent (more chocolate = better play).

Over there is Amelia Gray. She’s the editor-in-chief. This means we feed her extra chocolate, and in return she shakes down contributors until they cough up articles, or kifu, or both. That’s where her career track as a linguist in Japanese comes in handy. She plays on KGS and OGS as Kifudancer, has represented Australia in the International Amateur Pair Go Championship, and cruises around third kyu in strength, unless she’s angry. You wouldn’t like her when she’s angry.

In the cage at the other end are our two contributing editors, Jason Mackay and Alexander Hanysz. Jason is studying at the University of Queensland to be Indiana Jones, and likes to play at second dan around the Brisbane go scene. He plays as Nighteyes on KGS. He gets to write the commentaries to the kifu, and also mans the video camera. We grimly suspect him of podcasting.

Alex is a professional pianist in Adelaide, and could in theory stop eating chocolate any time he wants. When he’s not being egged on by the rest of us to play pair go, he’s a quite strong second dan in the Adelaide go scene. Occasionally he’ll contribute news from the current reconstruction of the Adelaide go scene (like Canberra, players got a little thin on the ground a couple of years ago), a bit of local colour from the tournaments that he turns up to, and of course, commentaries on the kifu. He plays as xela on KGS and OGS.

This is what we’ll try to do: when something go-related happens in Oceania, one of us’ll blog it. Or at least blog about it. The best of that, distilled and edited for style, plus player ratings and tournament results and professional demonstration games and international go news and items of interest from the Australian Go Association, will be compiled into editions of the Journal. Those will certainly be published as PDF, free for the downloading. When the AGA has established an individual member base (mid-2009), we’ll think about distributing the same thing as a printed magazine for the membership.

We’re always interested in more people to blog here, and more contributors to write the good stuff for the Journal proper. Email amelia@go.org.au to volunteer. For your pains, you’ll get a spiffy email address@go.org.au, some good useful publicity for your club or your tournament, and a warm fuzzy feeling of connection to the rest of the Australian go community. If nothing else, we’re good for a game of three colour go whenever you spot us at a tournament.

Want in?

by aguido in Other Tags: , , , ,

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