Archive for the ‘international’ Category

Bad news for the non-Asian Go world after round 4 of WAGC

Tuesday, May 29th, 2007

Bad news for the non-Asian Go world: the only players with 4 wins out of 4 games are: China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan.

There were several interesting pairings this round:

  • Fernando Aguilar against the Taiwanese representative.
  • Cristian Pop of Romania, ex-insei, against Korea.
  • Ondrej Silt of Czech Republic, ex-insei, against Japan.
  • Canada against China.

Also, Andy Liu of US, as the top placed player after 3 rounds (considering SOS and SOSOS) was matched against the bottom player with 2 wins - which happened to be Victor “Roseduke” Chow of South Africa - only to lose by half a point after 379 (!) moves. Andy Liu’s games so far can be found in the news section of the AGA website.

The games of Romania vs. Korea and Czech Republic vs. Japan (where the European representatives are both ex-insei in Japan) can be found on the tournament article page.

In the next round we’ll see the first big matches: Japan vs. Korea, and China vs. Taiwan.

Posted in international, tournament, wagc | No Comments »

World Amateur Go Championship 2007

Monday, May 28th, 2007

The 28th WAGC started in Japan earlier today.
This is a very exciting annual event - it’s more of a competition between countries, rather than an individual tournament, since each country is sending one (amateur) representative.
This year there are representatives from 68 countries.
I am going to write my thoughts on this tournament, which is going to run for 3 more days (there are 8 rounds, 2 per day).

Posted in amateur, international, wagc | 2 Comments »

Zhou Junxun of Taiwan wins international LG Cup

Wednesday, March 21st, 2007

Taiwan is catching up with the top 3 Go super-powers: Zhou Junxun 9p of Taiwan just won the 11th LG Cup international tournament. He defeated in the final match Hu Yaoyu 8p of China, 2-1.

While several Taiwanese born players moved to Japan as kids, became insei and then became top professionals in Japan, this is the first time that a Taiwanese trained professional had such a great success in an international title. There is an old article about Zhou Junxun’s earlier Go career at Mindzine.

The first game of the final match is commented at gogameworld.com - it is one of the several free sample commented games.

After Zhou Junxun won the first game by resign, the next 2 games were very close: both were half-pointers.

Here is a diagram from the last game:

Black (Zhou Junxun) ended up sente in the complicated joseki in the lower left, so he invaded the upper-left corner in sente, and then played tengen to reduce White’s central influence. A fight started as White invaded Black’s moyo on the right soon after this.

Posted in international, lg cup, professional, taiwan, zhou junxun | No Comments »