Tournament edition

Report by C. A. Steadman

The first North American Professional Go tournament just ended, and it was played primarily on the internet. Zhu Jiu Jaing 9 dan was the highest ranked player. He is famous internationally for his results playing for China in international tournaments. Yi-lun Yang 7 dan is probably most famous recently as a teacher of dramatically successful students throughout North America who he often teaches on IGS. Xiaoren He 5 dan is Canada's pride, and famous in the USA for her energetic lectures and simultaneous games during US Go Congresses. Jimmy Cha 4 dan is well loved for his philanthropic support of North American Go, and his dramatic defeats of various 9 dans in International competition. James Kerwin 1 dan has many students for his highly successful Go retreats in Canada the week before the US Go Congress, though the world at large probably knows him best as the developer of a popular computer football game. Janice Kim 1 dan is the charismatic driving force behind the "New Moves Press" which is promoting her line of Go books aimed at beginners.

Go in North America is fortunate to attract more and more professionals, but since this area is so large, it is practically impossible to assemble all the pros in one area to play. We have pros distributed all over, from Los Angeles California to Minnesota in the USA, and Canada even farther north. Also, there are relatively few professionals here who earn their entire livelihood from Go, and so it is hard to assemble them in one place for a tournament. The internet, though, where no one knows you are screaming, is perfect for playing Go.

The tournament required the volunteer work of many people, most importantly Chen Dao Lin, the guy who put it all together, and bore most of the headaches, and Jeff Shaevel and me. There are some amazing stories involved, facts that make this tournament almost miraculous. The three main tourney organizers had never been in the same room together, in fact, though Chen Dao and Jeff had met, neither of them even knew what I looked like, and probably didn't even know my first name when the thing got started. I had never met any of the organizers or players involved, and was still able to function relatively well as an organizer.

Perhaps most amazing is that the Ing foundation was willing to subsidize the tournament at all. After all, they had never met the people who would be running the tournament from day to day, and the Main TD Chendao had relatively little IGS experience. The Ing Foundation is willing to jump onto the latest technology to bring professional Go into new forums.

The pre tournament organizing involved intense planning by Phil Straus, the AGA president, Chendao Lin, the eastern Vice President of the AGA, Clay Smith, the Central VP, and Larry Gross, the Western VP on the AGA side. Phil Straus, president of the AGA got together (electronically) with the IGS admin types to get a special game format in which the occasionally rude kibitzes weren't recorded in the game record, as suggested by one of the pros. Chen Dao exchanged email with all the people involved in this project. The IGS side worked just as hard, as Tim Casey wrote fresh new code to support the new match command, and disseminated the information quickly enough that the client writers were able to come up with new versions of their clients that supported the new "pmatch." command in time for the tournament. Tweet was crucial not only as an IGS admin, but as what amounted to the 'IGS/AGA liaison,' a job he desperately wanted to avoid taking on, but ended up performing, since he knew what was needed from the IGS side, and was willing to yell at the AGA people to make sure that things happened. Since many of the pros weren't familiar with computers, much less the internet, we had to find helpers for each pro. We used two apiece, for each game; one to actually interface with the other pro via IGS, and one to keep track of the board and clock locally. Thus the tournament organization involved not only Chen Dao Lin, the main TD, but Jeff and me, the assistant TDs who supervised and coordinated the individual games, and a cast of many who worked with the pro at their playing areas. In fact the tournament came to rely on people who volunteered their help without understanding the magnitude of the task they were undertaking. Evan Johnson, for instance, bravely undertook the task of helping out people who were having problems observing the games on IGS, a huge task that made the jobs of the organizers much easier. He compiled a list of the updated versions of all the clients, and the places where they were stored on the internet, and updated that list as the tournament went on. Many questions the TD's were asked during the tournament were answered "ask eaj," the login name of Mr. Johnson.

The first game featured a dramatic fight between Yi-lun Yang and Janice Kim on June 8th. Jeff Shaevel was the Tournament Director for the game. Mr. Yang won, and the thing was underway, with "rabcat" as the early leader. Xiaoren He of Canada quickly assumed her rightful place in the hearts of the organizers by being the first to finish her games, and being responsible for absolutely *no* scheduling difficulties. She was the victim of the first upset of the tournament, losing to James Kerwin. Once she delayed logging on for almost an hour, as Toronto was experiencing incredible storms, and her neighborhood was one of many without electricity. Still, her referee and scribe kept her company as she waited out the power outage, and she played the game. I called her then and wished I was there to share stories by candlelight with her and our IGS friends assembled in the dark. I was there half an hour later, with people from all over the world who watched her play.

Every player won at least one game, and there were quite a few upsets. The games routinely set new records for observers, as tension built over the course of the tournament. It became routine to see over 100 observers for these games, even though the time controls ensured that the games lasted more than four hours.

The finals between Zhu Jui Jiang and Jimmy Cha drew a wide audience, of two people at the playing site (me and Chendao Lin) and hundreds around the world on igs. They played in the "presidential dining room" at Seattle University, a room with carpet older than Washington state. Seriously there was a sign on the wall saying that it was wool, and from the 1800's. There was a working phone outlet, and a power outlet, which was fortunate for me, because my batteries wouldn't have lasted for the 6 hours of the games, and changing batteries there would have disturbed the players. The time control was two hours apiece basic time, then 5 periods of 1 minute each. The clock was a very snazzy Chronos thing, supplied by Jeff. The board would have been a very nice 4 inch think mass of wood, but the players thought it was too high for comfortable play, so they used a normal wooden board and standard Ing stones.

Now to the computer. I hope this is all news to you, because I tried very hard to keep my computer tribulations from intruding on the games. My hard disk is divided into four partitions, and one of them died the day before the congress started. I had a hard time even getting my computer to boot, as the system was partly corrupted by the disk problem. To top it all off, my Internet connection to Korea picked that week to become unreliable at best. Ok, so there I am with a computer that only partly works, trying to transcribe the moves onto IGS and record the game. After being unable to connect to IGS for half an hour, I got a message from the congress office, half a campus away, that tweet had called offering his help. I also got a call from dove at the University of Washington, who wasn't at the congress, but reported that his connection to Korea was fine. Yeah, the University of Washington was all of three miles away, but had no lag, while my Internet connection reeked. Dove was generous enough to offer me an account he wasn't using for the games, but calling him was difficult, because his office phone is also used by his modem! During my trials, Chendao was valiantly recording the game on a computer he didn't know, using SmartGo, the program that gave the world the sgf format. Finally, Tim Casey, who happened to be at the congress as our guest came down, and between us we futzed with the computer to quickly redo the "preferences" in my communications programs so that I could log on another Internet provider. Since I was now not using my normal PPP connection, i couldn't log on simultaneously as both Jujo and jcha, and I quickly drafted dove on IGS to be jcha. We managed to catch up with the board position on IGS during the players hour long lunch break. After the break, however, I was dependant on two peoples lag to get the moves reflected on igs. Still, everything worked fine until byo-yomi, when the moves came just too quickly for lag. So in a pattern I repeated every game, we adjourned the game until the end. We were able to show the end of the game on IGS as soon as the game ended, and in every game the moves were played on IGS before anybody left the room. Even in the worst of cases, people on IGS saw the games before anybody else in the world, much less at the congress where they were actually played.

Game one was very exciting, and was an upset. Mr. Cha won, and since he is Korean, Seattle's large Korean community went nuts. The owner of the local Korean newspaper is an active Go player himself, and an active philanthropist in the local Go scene. He asked me when he saw me the day after the second game if he could get the record for the game, and like the sleep deprived true idiot I was, I recommended the second game (which Mr. Jiang won.) Fortunately, I quickly realized the gaffe, and we laughed about it. There was a triumphant headline in the Korean paper, a photo of the players at the board, and a print out of the game, with the game being the only part of the whole production I could read.

Game two featured even more dramatic computer problems. By this time, not only was my machine almost refusing to boot up, but the network manipulations of the day before made my communications programs temperamental. Fortunately, I came to the playing site early, and a combination of burning incense to the computer gods, and incantations of great power in dead languages got everything up and running. This time dsaun played the role of jcha through the lunch break, but I came back from lunch at the last minute, since I had been determined to actually eat something this time. So, in a last minute panic, when I noticed that jcha wasn't logged on, I asked jansteen to be jcha. Dsaun was in fact on as dsaun, and in my panic I hadn't noticed. This game featured even more dramatic lag, and even the tragedy of a misplayed sequence of moves in the transcribing. I didn't let dsaun (who finished the transcribing) resign as jcha at the end, because though the board position was correct, the misplayed sequence made the record inaccurate, and I didn't want it preserved. It wasn't until the next day that I was able to review the game with Mr. Jiang. Then of course I posted the correct game record to rec.games.go.

Game two was analyzed in the evening by Mr. Abe 9 dan at the congress, and about halfway through his analysis Mr. Cha walked in, and quickly took over. Mr Cha had finished analysing the game with Mr. Jiang mere minutes before, and proceeded to contradict practically everything Mr. Abe had said about the game. It was very amusing, and one of the few things that people actually present at the Go Congress were able to enjoy that the internet audience wasn't.

The next day was boring from the computer point of view. The competition was tied at one victor apiece, though there might have been some feeling that Mr. Jiang had the advantage. He is after all, the 9 dan, and he had won the pre finals meeting between the two, so he now had a one game advantage in recent games with Mr. Cha.

There was a funny feeling in the room before the players came in. I was there early in anticipation of the computer problems which fortunately didn't occur, sitting there alone I felt as if I wasn't in a plush air conditioned room with comfortable chairs, but alone leaning on the fence at some hot and dusty corral, waiting for the gunfighters to show, knowing that the dust would be turned to mud by spilled blood. This feeling of seriousness wasn't voiced by anyone. Mr. Cha and Mr. Jiang were polite, even friendly as they talked about whether they wanted coffee or just ice water. It seemed as if they wanted to spend some time talking about the pleasant trivialities that accompany the assembly of people. When they actually sat at the board it was almost with reluctance, but certainly not with a sense that the game was very important. It was almost as if they were saying; "Well, we are here, there is a board and stones, we might as well play a game." Somehow this approach to the game emphasized my earlier feeling about eminent destruction.

The actual game is something you must look at yourself, I am not competent to discuss it. However, late in the game it became clear that Mr. Cha was uncomfortable. He complained about the noise made by my computer as I typed in the moves. For the last fifty moves or so, I recorded the game the old fashioned way, on paper. They were played at a lightening pace, and eventually the players even stopped hitting the clock, as if the game were already over, and they were merely putting the stones were they needed to be at the end of the game. It was almost anti-climactic when Mr. Cha finally resigned. I spent the next hour playing out the end of the game on IGS, alone in the room once again. The day ended almost as it had begun, and the carpet was a deep blood red.

angus

Page creation: Jan van der Steen