The 12 Korea Prime Minister Cup World Amateur Baduk Championship opens today in Buan, South Korea with games starting tomorrow. The website with players and schedule is at http://kpmc.kbaduk.or.kr/eng/. I noticed L19's quantumf is there for South Africa, and also a player from Iran which I've not seen participate before. I didn't have enough leave from work to go this year, so Bruno Poltronieri is playing for the UK (yes he has an Italian surname, and was born in France, but has lived in Britain since a young child and became a citizen recently).

Is it just me or is the field a bit weaker on average than in the past? Are the players mostly paying for their own travel?

Iirc the organisers pay for half the cost of the flights (up to some reasonable limit), which is better than the WAGC (players pay all) but worse than the Chinese Gold Cup (organisers pay all).

As for getting weaker, bear in mind that 6 of the top European players are no longer eligible to play to play in these amateur events with the new EGF pro system, and similar for USA/Canada. It's a shame we'll never see Ilya or co winning the KPMC/WAGC (I think he now has a non-negligible chance).

As far as I know, the invitations came only about 6 weeks in advance of the event and the countries had less than 3 weeks to decide on who to send. I guess that since go players do have a normal life, too, some countries could not send their strongest players but someone who is available - which I think is perfectly fine and understandable. And reasonable.

By the way: Is there any good way to read the results table? It's a complete mess without knowing the start number of each player...

_________________

I got my invitation from the BGA on 6th July. And yes the results table with mysterious player ids is useless! (though with more rounds now we could do some detective induction game to figure them out from results)

Take the last year's result list and iterate the start numbers from that...

Cheers,
Vesa

Yes, and then take away countries that didn't show up and add new countries at the bottom.

Here's a list:

1 China
2 Taiwan
3 Korea
4 Canada
5 Thailand
6 Japan
7 Czechia
8 Israel
9 France
10 Hong Kong
11 Russia
12 Vietnam
13 Malaysia
14 Indonesia
15 Sweden
16 USA
17 Singapore
18 Romania
19 Belgium
20 Turkey
21 Norway
22 Lithuania
23 Netherlands
24 Poland
25 Colombia
26 Hungary
27 New Zealand
28 Slovakia
29 Finland
30 Mongolia
31 Switzerland
32 Slovenia
33 Mexico
34 Denmark
35 Germany
36 Italy
37 Belarus
38 Argentina
39 Macau
40 Spain
41 Serbia
42 South Africa
43 Chile
44 Luxembourg
45 Peru
46 Guatemala
47 Ireland
48 Australia
49 Austria
50 Brasil
51 Cyprus
52 Ecuador
53 Kazakhstan
54 Panama
55 UK
56 Korea 2

EDIT: India -> Indonesia

Thanks Herman. But 14 should be Indonesia: I didn't think Bruno would lose to the Indian player! (who actually didn't turn up now I check results instead of player list).

So Bruno beat Longyang Li 5d NZ, lost to Zhongxia Zhao 7d USA, Umar Fitrah Faishal 4d Indonesia (I played him in Gold Cup), Vladas Zaleskas 3d Lithuania.

quantumf lost to Umar Fitrah Faishal 4d Indonesia, beat Mathis Isaksen 2d Denmark, lost to Philippe Fanaro 1d Brazil, beat Jeremie Hertz 2k Luxembourg.

At the top it's Korea/China/Japan on 4 wins, Japan beating Taiwan in round 4.

Thanks, edited!

Dutch rep Alexander Eerbeek started with 3/3 and was paired down in the fourth round. Sadly, he lost to Israel's Amir Fragman, otherwise he would have joined the big three at 4/4

Zhao Yikang of China won with 6/6, Ozeki Minoru of Japan 2nd on 5/6 (lost to China, beat Korea), Choi Kwang-Ho of Korea 3rd (lost to Japan, beat Taiwan). Abraham Florencia 5d from Mexico was a surprise in 4th (lost against Thailand 5d in round 1 and then won rest of games against decent but not super strong opposition, e.g. last 2 Alexander Eerbeek 5d from Netherlands and Peter Marko 4d Hungary). Bruno won his last 2 to finish on 3/6.

As usual there are howls of complaints about the draw system which are quickly ignored.

_________________
North Lecale