From what I gather, it's not about spoiling the party for everybody, but rather about spoiling the party for some of the strongest players - either the Asians or the Europeans. The difficulty is finding a compromise between:

a) Having a great tournament with strong players from all over the world

and

b) Giving some legitimate recognition to the strongest European player.

A sub-problem of b) is defining "European."

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Patience, grasshopper.

Maybe it's my outlook on Go, but if I was actually strong enough to be in these top divisions, I'd choose to play in an open division against the Koreans even if it meant having no shot at the title. If Oh Chi-min, Cho Seok-bin and In-Seong Hwang are likely to be excluded because they are too strong and messing up the ease of finding a bona-fide European champion, I think the top Europeans should be delighted to have such incredible strength to play against.

One solution may be simply not to have a European champion at all. There's no Japanese, Chinese or Korean champions after all. We could instead have a number of European titles, that are all completely up for grabs. If Ondrej Silt won the international tournament he was in this year (BC Card Cup? I forget which) I'm sure none of the Asian professionals he would have had to have beaten would have begrudged him the fact he won.

I think any tournament that has the strongest players moved sideways because of ethnicity, race, or simply nationality, has the cart pulling the horse somehow.

What about making it plain simple: Give everyone, who is willing to play, their chance. Top ranked European (common is like born inside Europe - yes, you can determine that - or residency for at least 5 years in one country in Europe) becomes European champion and gets price money. And top ranked player overall gets price money, too.
I would say, both get the same amount. If you win both, well, then you get both =D

And if you don't have enough money for four prices (EC and place 1,2,3) then just split the pot accordingly.

Now, one can argue about how to handle professional participation. I would say for instance, that Taranu or Dinerchtein should be willing to constribute simul games and/or commentary, when they want to participate.

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go

I think the mainproblem behind the idea of seperating the top EU players from foreigners is the McMahon-System.
If the first spots are filled with asians it is much likly that not the direct result but some kind of tiebreaker like SOS, SSOS determinates the "Euro-Go-Champion". It is really sad if the championship is based on some kind of badluck-pairing and therfore resulting bad SOS-Points.

Jonas,
Best solution is smaller MM top group. So, top Europeans will have time to meet top Europeans. They will not spend time playing 2d-4d players (I played lot of them during the last few EGC)

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Making MM groups smaller does not solve the tiebreaker problem. Not using tiebreakers at all for the final results ordering does solve the tiebreaker problem.

Sang-Dae Hahn,

this is not a race issue at all. It is about citizenship and / or place of regular residence: Europe(an).

It is also not against mutual respect, appreciation, friendship, mutual understanding at all. Many Europeans perceive Go as a multi-level gaming family. There are different levels from family / personal, close friends via city, region within a country, country, the continent to the world. When I want to play Go within my family, I do so and do not make it an open event for guests from everywhere in the world. Europan Go culture has - besides the great majority of tournaments open to all players from the whole world - also a small percentage of tournaments for the non-world-wide-levels of gaming family: in particular national championships and the European (Closed) Championship (title). Since you speak of mutual respect, can you respect it that many of us Europeans want to have a closed championship at all - quite like we respect however open or closed the Koreans organize the tournaments in their home country? It is not only Europeans with a sense of closure though. E.g., the World Amateur Go Championship allows per country only players with its respective citizenship. I am not allowed to organize and play in Kiribati's championship to represent that country and Koreans are not allowed to qualify via Tuvalu's championship.

The European Open Championship belongs to the most liberal tournaments. Amateurs, inseis, and professionals from all countries may participate. Can the same be said about all Korean tournaments? No.

That we have the European Open Championship does not mean though that we would want to forget about our European level gaming family - rather we also want to have the European (Closed) Championship.

Different cultures can exchange their different experiences only if each culture is allowed to survive. Permit European gaming culture to survive! Having also a European (Closed) Championship is part of our cultural desire. Having it at the congress as well: We like the exchange with kibitzes, to meet players in / outside the championship and need to keep annual travel costs within reasonable bounds.

Having a closed European Championship is not anti-competitive. Quite contrarily, it increases competition among the Europeans themselves.

Most Europeans like to play everybody at suitable opportunies. In particular, strong Europeans like to play the usually stronger East Asians. This does just not go so far to stop and abandon the European culture of having a European (Closed) Championship. You do not forget your own family entirely to spread Go around the world 365 day a year, right? Likewise, we do not forget our own gaming family to play with East Asian players as often as we can.

"The spirit of Go" is not as one-sided as you suggest. It is a game the CAN be played between players from the whole world but it is NOT a game that ALWAYS HAS TO be played at the global level.

The more I see the more I agree with Java. Let the congress pick the top 8 Europeans who then play a double round-robin tournament to decide the European champion.

This way the congress with 100+ players gets to be entirely open, and a place where the very best Go is played, and the Go championship a small closed tournament with the top eligible participants.

The British title is a 1 vs 1 tournament, selected from the top 2 in an eight way single round robin, selected from the top eight in a 1k+ open swiss. This I think adds a lot more credibility to the title itself, and whereas the logistics of the individual title match are not appropriate for Europe, one double round robin tournament is.

Beautiful. The depth of our ignorance is beautiful. We should be honured to have Korean players on our congresses. European players learn so much from them. My teacher played on the last congress. He and his friend were pleased about the number of games they played against top players. Both teaching and playing. They are making our players feel good, and we are well on our way to make them spot coming to the EGC. Event should be open. If needed, it would be best to remove the top european prize, and make another tournament, not associated with the EGC, that will determine European Champion. But I do not want to linger on this subject. I want to ask everyone of you who have the need of ruining the EGC for Koreans one question: Who do you think you are?

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LovroKlc: No one wants to ruin the EGC for the asian players; that is why we have this discussion!

Currently, the closed EC is somewhat ruined for the european players; that is why something might need to be changed.

There is no reason to insult the participants of this discussion for their draft proposals.

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A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

A double round robin would need a whole week to play, I was only advocating a single round robin. 7 games in 4 days.

This would be ideal, but maybe hard to organise. Breakfast made a better suggestion, about online qualifying.

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7 games in 4 days is not ideal at all:

- Too few players in the championship.
- Too small thinking times.
- Too few rounds.
- Number of rounds violates an AGM decision.
- 2 games per day further reduce playing quality.

Everyone who took part in the online qualification is part of the championship. Having "only" 8 in the final stage is still exciting for spectators.



Are you professionals that are paid to play go? No, championship needs to be compressed to fit in with leave arrangements etc.



A bureacratic matter.

I think 8 players in a championship is very common, but I am not surprised to see Robert claim otherwise. The EGC was decided many times with an 8 player group.

From discussion on GD and other places (RGG?) it was made clear that a big reason for excluding "non-Europeans" is because the European players want the prize money. Likewise I think it could be said that some of the Asian players come to the EGC because they can win prize money. However, it costs them a lot to come and without a chance to win money covering their expenses maybe they wouldn't come at all.

There is no reason why an open tournament can't be used to determine the championship unless the European Champion is supposed to win the top prize money. If there are players who the "Europeans" can't beat then the "European" champion becomes similar to a contest decided by who climbs the highest up an unclimbable mountain. That seems an entirely reasonable way to determine a champion. As for the prize money, it really does seem that some strong European players view the prize money as "theirs" to win and are upset that "foreigners" win it. Regardless of actual intention, excluding foreigners from the tournament has the same effect as if there were an intention to discriminate. When some action has the same effect as a wrong action, intention isn't important.

I'm afraid that excluding the Asian players makes the people who manage European Go Congress look very petty indeed.

quantumf, the long thinking time is great! It produces high quality games. One does not need to be a paid professional to use long thinking times.

Javaness, 8 players round-robin in the past was ok since at those times there were comparatively few strong players.

Nowadays, there are lots of more strong players. 8 (or 10 or so) players round-robin would still be ok if the 8 players were qualified by a highly reliable seeding procedure like, e.g., a series of qualification tournaments.

gowan, prize money is not the only, but just one of the aspects.



Why do you think so?

Sure, but without subsidies you want the top players. I would love to see a double round robin, with a game per day, taking a whole fortnight. You can have 4 hours per player per match thinking time if you like, you have more rounds than in any other European tournament, and no issues with game quality.

However, how do you propose getting 8 top European players to take a fortnight off, likely in a foreign country, with no expenses paid, just for a single tournament? If this is manageable, I would love to see this format, else it's a matter of making the most of what can be done with the resources around.

Selection for this top 8 could be the top 8 Europeans from the Go congress, or a number of other possibilities like awarded points for results across the various PandaNet European tournaments.