Paris Go Tournament
by Anders Kierulf
2014-04-24
I’m glad I was able to play in the 2014 Paris Go tournament. I expected a large tournament like last time I played there in 1985, but snafus with the tournament site and late announcement meant that only 66 players showed up. Unfortunately, this caused a wide range of strengths in the top band, and all games were played without handicap, so hard to judge how my jet-lagged 3-dan AGA rating compared to the European rankings.
I ended up winning two games and losing four; see the full results of the tournament. As promised in my recent tweets, here are the games, with comments based on going through the games with my opponents plus some remarks kindly offered by Chizu Kobayashi 5p. Most of the comments were written using SmartGo Kifu on the plane back, with some cleanup using SmartGo on the Mac when I got back.
- All six games as a PDF (created using an early version of Go Books on the Mac).
- Game 1 vs Noguchi Motoki 7d (SGF)
- Game 2 vs Knippel Arnaud 2d (SGF)
- Game 3 vs Ougier Guillaume 1k (SGF)
- Game 4 vs Fagot_Bouquet Loic 2k (SGF)
- Game 5 vs Vazquez Oscar 2d (SGF)
- Game 6 vs Lextrait César 3d (SGF)
I feel like I learned a lot, and with 90 minutes per player, this was a good warmup for the Go Congress in New York. The main feedback from Chizu Kobayashi 5p (after round 4) was that I had gotten into a habit of playing atari first when I should simply be extending; that really helped me in the last two rounds. But clearly, there’s much more to work on.