06 Mar 2010 1 Comment
| April 17, 2010 | to | April 18, 2010 |
This is a placeholder for the weekend in mid-April when the Keio Old Boys will be visiting Brisbane for their annual shindig with the Brisbane Go Club. Dinner on Saturday evening, random go, lunch and the now-traditional team vs team match on Sunday. RSVP and/or query John Hardy at the club, if you’re in Brisbane at all and want to come play.
20 Dec 2009 1 Comment
The 2009 Brisbane rengo champions are Larry Wen 3d and Andrew Gray 9k. The three rounds of pair-ish go on Saturday started a little late, and finished a lot late, but that was alright, because it doubled as the Brisbane Go Club’s Christmas party, and there was plenty of BBQ and salad and delicious desserts to keep the membership occupied. We had eleven teams:
up from eight competing last year. Second place went to team A (Tim and Rene) with three wins and 2 points SOS, and third place (with a box of Christmas crackers as the prize) went to team L (Andrew and Matthew) with 2 wins and a bye. As always the draw was a mutant Swiss with initial slide pairing, ably executed by Amelia Gray with a bare spreadsheet and mysterious incantations, then funneled through whichever BGC committee member was handiest as a front man:
The consensus is that Yanis is indeed not a fifth kyu, Fumiko Hulme is indeed not a tenth kyu, and that go on a thirteen by thirteen board is much deeper than it looks. Many thanks to club president Mark Bell for his house as the venue and the barbeque (and the beer), John Hardy for donating the first prize, and the players for turning up and joining in in such good spirits.
13 Nov 2009 No Comments
| February 6, 2010 | to | February 7, 2010 |
The thirtieth Queensland Championships will occur over Saturday 6 February and Sunday 7 February, 2010, in the Holt Room at the Student Union on the University of Queensland campus at St Lucia in Brisbane. There will be an open division for dan players (attracting AGA representative points) and a handicap division for kyu players. First round of six starts at nine o’clock, and there is a published schedule running until five o’clock both days.
Please RSVP to your nearest Brisbane Go Club officer – use the registration form or write an email. If you’re interstate, that’s horatio@go.org.au. Because this is an AGA-sanctioned championship, competitors will need to either have current Australian Go Association membership or be prepared to acquire some during registration (club membership will do nicely), and will accrue AGA credit points from their placings. Entry is five dollars for students and juniors (thank QUGS for this one) and thirty-five dollars for everyone else. Anyone and everyone who plays any sort of go in the greater Brisbane area is welcome and strongly encouraged to turn out and play.
The 2010 annual general meeting of the Brisbane Go Club, including elections, will take place on the Sunday of the tournament, during lunch.
30 Mar 2009 No Comments
After the final three tournament rounds on Sunday, the Queensland Open Go Champion for 2009 is Kevin Jiang 6d with a clean sweep of six victories. Kevin was also the 2008 champion. Second place went to Fred Huang 3d, and third to Chulho Rhee 4d, each with five wins. The Queensland Kyu Go Champion for 2009 is the Journal’s own Amelia Gray 3k with five victories. Second place went to Bruce Macintosh 5k with five victories, and third place to Warrakun Mangrai 8k with four wins.
The Brisbane consulate-general of the People’s Republic of China was kind enough to send consul Duan Zhong to say a few words at the closing ceremony, and to donate some rather colourful prizes for all six winners. Above are pictured (from left to right), Amelia, the consul, and Kevin, just after the trophies were presented; picture by Rodney Topor, who was one of several bystanders to come along to watch the finale.
More pictures as people start decanting their cameras…
29 Mar 2009 No Comments
This weekend is the Queensland State Championships, run by the usual suspects at the Brisbane Go Club. I’m liveblogging from the venue, thanks to the wonders of mobile prepaid broadband. :)
After three rounds on day one, the open division placings are as follows:
plus eleven others with fewer than two wins. In the kyu division, the placings so far are:
plus six others with fewer than two wins. The day also featured the Brisbane Go Club‘s annual general meeting, which re-elected the same officers as last year and discussed the upcoming Ballina Go Camp.
Three more rounds, and pictures to come.
04 Mar 2009 1 Comment
For the past few semesters, the Queensland University Gaming Society has met every academic week or so and played go. They also meet at a frenetic pace to play other board, card, and strategy games, but that’s another blog post. The go meetings are usually led by one or two students who hold dual membership with the Brisbane Go Club, which also loans some decent boards and stones to QUGS for the purpose, and usually makes itself visible at UQ’s O Week clubs-and-societies day.
First semester started this week, and so did the go playing for 2009. For a change the group convened in the Science Learning Centre in the Priestley Building, rather than haunting one of the refectories. It was lunchtime, so I dropped in at half past eleven to see whether they’d get five or maybe push the envelope and have six regular players this year.
Well.
First they ran out of boards. Then they ran out of players to teach the newcomers. Then they ran out of tables. I lost count at half-a-dozen games (two of ‘em on the floor), but I’m told by witnesses who stuck out the entire five hours (!) that on the order of twenty people came through and played. Strengths ranged from three dan to (sorry, dude) thirty kyu. I couldn’t persuade any of them to turn up to the Queensland Championships, but you can’t have everything.
A dozen students playing go is small change to one of the large inner-city clubs. But it will be interesting to see where the numbers are next week.
21 Dec 2008 1 Comment
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:
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. :)
Go Game Guru