Website of The International Go Federation

As of January 24, fourteen Latin American countries divided in two leagues will be fighting to reach the top in the 5th Pandanet Go Latin American Team Championship.

Novel in this season is Cuba playing in League A and standing as a strong competitor for the Championship, as their top three boards rank as 5 dan and the team has an average level of 3 dan.

Meanwhile, in League B, we also find a strengthened Uruguay with the recent incorporation of Martin Benenati 5d, promising a close fight with Chile and Venezuela who are also trying to fight their way back to League A.

Showdown starts immediately on the first round with heavy matches like Argentina v. Mexico, who last season finished second and fourth, respectively, and Brazil v. Peru who finished first and third, respectively.

Follow the 1st round of the Championship on Sunday 24th at 19 hrs GMT-6 on the LatinAmericanTeam Champ room in Pandanet.

Report by Emil García

In a hard-fought match, Brazil overcame Argentina to become the champion of the 4th PGLATC.

Of the three games played, the first one to finish was the third-board match between Brazil’s Helcio Alexander and Argentina’s Luciano Salerno. While Salerno kept the lead throughout most of the game, a later invasion proved too deep which gave the victory to Alexander.

Later on, the second board finished with a large point victory for Brazil’s Wang Sen Feng over Argentina’s Santiago Tabares.

At last, the first board finished with a victory of Argentina’s Fernando Aguilar over Israelian-Brazilian Amir Fragman, in a game with plenty of fighting and group exchanging.

So the result was a 2-1 victory for Brazil. Congratulations!

Records of the games:

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can also check out Mateusz Surma 2p’s commentary of this match behind this link.

Report by Emil García

SIIG at a university go event in Mexico City, 2015

On November 23rd, an eleven v. eleven players online team match took place on KGS between Mexico’s representative team and the ‘Sociedad Internacional de Intercambio de Go’, SIIG.

The SIIG is a Japanese-based society of retired women and men who like to share through go and that has traveled to many countries in the globe in past years with that purpose. In Latin America they’ve been in Argentina, Chile, Cuba, and Mexico. The last time they were in Mexico was in October 2015, and since then, five online go matches with Mexico have been played.

So far all 5 matches have been victories for the Japanese team, and although the result of this last match was a 6-5 victory for SIIG, this is perhaps the closest Mexico has ever come to the win.

You can visit SIIG website behind this link or join the ‘Sala SIIG de Japón’ room on KGS under Social to find many SIIG members to play a match with.

Report by Emil García

The first edition of Corona Cup took place in spring 2020 and had 361 participants – exactly the same as the number of intersections on the go board.

The second edition was held on the KGS and lasted more than one month, from November 2 till December 15. The participants played one game a week, and each pair could arrange the date and time of the game by themselves – a very flexible schedule.

This time the tournament attracted even bigger number of players: 400 participants from 34 different countries.

Kim Youngsam 7d from Germany repeated his success, winning the Corona Cup once again. The runner-up was Artem Kachanovskyp 2p (Ukraine), while the bronze medal went to Ilya Shikshin 3p (Russia).

For more information please see the following links:
Article on the first edition of Corona Cup
Announcement of the second edition of Corona Cup
Tournament table

Report by Artem

The European Go Championship (hence, ‘EC’) ended two weeks ago. The winner this year was Ilya Shikshin 3p from Russia. You can find more details in the article on the results of the EC2020.

This year, due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the EC had to be played online. This brought up a special format that was used, and of course a special organisation experience.

Below you will find an interview with Jean-Yves Papazoglou from France, the Vice-President of the European Go Federation. This year, as usual, he took care of organising the EC. Let’s see what he tells us about this new experience of organising the online EC.

1. How do you feel after the tournament is over? Was it a hard job to organise the European Championship online?
It was a big relief once the European Championship finished on November 2nd with an ultimate and decisive game between Ali Jabarin 2p (Israel) and Ilya Shikshin 3p (Russia). Traditionally this championship is organised during our annual European Go Congress with money prizes offered by the congress organisation. Hence, as it was not possible to run it live in Ukraine, we awaited better times to organise it later in the year which finally was not possible due to the resurgence of the COVID-19 virus in Europe. Early September, we decided to run it online without prizes. After a few days, no EGF pros registered and protested that no money prizes were available. We had the idea to suggest our go fan lovers support this championship via crowdfunding. And it worked very well beyond our expectations and all EGF pros (except for one) decided to participate.

2. How many people worked in a team for the EC organisation?
Basically, it was myself supported by the EGF Executive Board, Lorenz Trippel, our secretary, and Ali Jabarin (or the EGF pros) for any decision we had to take. For example, we hesitated how to ensure the live commentaries via our EGF Youtube channel with a preliminary subscription or via the EGF Twitch channel with free access to all. The final choice was to offer free access and to expect additional donations thanks to the promotion we did during the commentaries. It worked thanks to many enthusiastic donors who appreciated the games and the several-hours-long live commentaries from our top EGF players.

3. Please describe briefly the tournament system that was used this year.
This year we changed the system, as it was an online tournament and the period to run it was an extended one (from September 21 to November 2). We started with 32 players selected out of the 8 from the previous European Championship and the best rated EGF players. Like in tennis at the Roland Garros tournament, we organised two qualification rounds for the players beyond rank 8. The top 8 qualified to play against the players ranked 1-8. After two single-elimination rounds, the top 4 entered the final phase with a best of three games. All games were played with Fischer time: 60mn + 30 s/ move which means an average of 4-hour games.

4. How did the organising process go?
As the time to organise it was very short (only 2 weeks), we are happy that we had 32 players motivated to play it, and nearly all the strongest EGF players applied. One difficulty with online games was the video recording system we suggested to the players to avoid cheating. It was new for us and inspiration came from a similar experience in Asia. We implemented a video call via Skype with the recording of each player and their screen. It worked pretty well without any claim or suspicion of cheating. The commission we put in place, consisting of Antti Törmänen 1p, Yoon Young-sun 8p, and Zhao Balong 2p had nearly no work all along the championship.

During the final phase, we had to take into account an unexpected but happy event on Artem Kachanovskyi’s side with the birth of his second child. To avoid pronouncing a forfeit, all other players very kindly accepted to postpone the semi-final against Ali by one week.
Another potential issue during online games is the misclick that can happen with a very sensitive PC’s mouse. It happened once, and the other player accepted the request for undo. All along the Championship, we could feel the trust and respect between all players for each other which made it a real pleasure for me to organise such a competition.

Initially, we planned to have proctors for the top 4 players, but they mutually agreed that was not necessary as there is a high level of trust between them.

5. Please tell us about the crowdfunding campaign.
The most difficult part was to select the right crowdfunding platform (OkPal) and get our EGF bank account certified by them. Our EGF treasurer, Harry van der Kroegt will remember how many emails and exchanges were necessary. We established a system with Gold and Silver donors who would benefit from specific goodies and rewards: advertising, pictures with the EC winner, commentaries by EGF pros of the best 5 games, simultaneous games against an EGF pro, t-shirts, and copies of the 2016 EGF yearbook.
As the crowdfunding worked well (3,950€ for a target of 3,000€), we were able to secure enough funding for the commentaries of all games played during the final phase.

6. Did you enjoy observing the games?
Indeed, it was a unique opportunity for the first time to follow all games as they were not played all at the same time as in the live championship. Also, we benefitted from the kibitz of top players who were watching, and commented on the ongoing games on the OGS server.
The final games with the best of three were very spectacular to observe as we could feel the stakes were high for all finalists, and especially for Ilya Shishkin who was searching for his 7th European championship title, thus equaling his compatriot Alexander Dinerstein. Our EGF top players helped us to better follow the games and appreciate how powerful they are. We reached a peak of more than 500 observers on the OGS server which is a kind of record for such an EGF championship.
I would like to thank all those who supported this championship: the 32 players for their impressive games and the EGF pro team led by Ali Jabarin who organised the live Twitch commentaries (nearly 40 hours in total).

You can see the following links for more details:

European Championship 2020 webpage
EGF crowdfunding campaign
Interview with Ilya Shikshin, European Champion 2020

Report by Artem