You are right to highlight this, and in a sense her achievement Chie's even better than the figures suggest. She has a brittle-bone disease and so plays in a wheelchair. This is very tiring (4 hours in a chair is normally the red line) and so I imagine some of her games must be affected. Her teacher is no less than Hane Naoki. His decision, unusual at his level, to take on a pupil tells us he rates her very highly (as does her large fan base).

She is still only 19, and so perhaps still has a surfeit of fighting spirit, but that helped her to a come-back victory against Rina, by winning a semeai, in the Women's Kisei yesterday (though it did seem to me Rina may have hallucinated), so she now in the semi-finals in the easier side of the draw, and her record is now 30-15.

Yep, 30/15 now

I know about her condition, and it sure must be tiring. Go is a game of the mind, but the body plays a role too. Kudos to Chie.
About the game and the dead group, I thought the same: I must be missing something, because Rina had enough liberties and for some reason, she didn't respond when she had. My counting is not accurate enough to evaluate the position. I just thought that she couldn't afford to lose a move and play the killing move. But hallucination is another good explanation.

Another interesting topic, I nearly forgot:
Tomorrow (Nov 12), there will be a small tournament, Fumakiller, in Hiroshima. A small exhibition, I think, with Fujisawa vs Yimin and Ueno Asami vs Sumire. And then the winners, of course. Time is NHK style: 30 sec/move + 10 min byo-yomi.
I don't think there were any preliminaries. It must be under invitation. You can follow it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHik-o70JKc

I will miss it, but I want to see the results. Sumire might be able to get a win, if the fight gets crazy enough.

In case anyone else is wondering. Fumakilla is a company that makes pesticides.

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By the way, Nyu Eiko 3-dan is playing Kobayashi Satoru 9-dan today. This is their final game in Section A of the Gosei tournament. The game is on Yugen no Ma server. Kobayashi (white) approached a corner on move 4. Nyu started a fight on move 13. Should be fun to review later.

If I read this right, she won. https://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/match_news/ ... 11115.html

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

Yes. 12th woman to make it to Big 7 finals, 17th time it's been done since 1979. Four times in Reiwa already.

Next step up will be the first woman to make it to the Big Three leagues (Kisei, Meijin, Honinbo), though they also have yet to get beyond the Oza foothills.

Okuda Aya 4-dan also made a splash in the 4-round SGW Cup last week, beating two 9-dan men and one 8-dan, ending up in 2nd place out of 16 (Han Zenki beat her in the final round).

I checked the record this morning and the game did end up being wild. Very excited for her.

The event (calling it tournament feels strange...) took place.

Yimin won Fujisawa, this could happen, and Sumire beat Ueno, this was more surprising, although I hoped it to happen sometime soon. Although pros always play seriously, it is still not the same as an official game, in a tournament.

In the "final", Yimin won. Overall, the feeling was "anything can happen". In my opinion it is a good thing, for fans.

For those who do not know, we are now in the 3rd year of Reiwa. So this means 17 times in 42 years, 4 of them the last 3 years. Something is changing.



Meijin has been soooo close this year. About Kisei, are we talking league B1/B2? A? S? In 1-2 years, there could be a serious chance.




SGW Cup was an example of what was discussed a few messages ago. Who could qualify? Players between 31 and 60 years old who have never won one of the top 7 titles. In other words, to me: not too young, still active, strong but not top players. 1 woman amongst 16 players, doing well. It shows that some years ago, players were mostly male. In comparison, let's see the next Hiroshima Aluminum Cup, with 16 young players. 15 men, 5 women, one of then is current champion Fujisawa Rina. I'd say there is a difference between generations.

Little bit different - previous winners of Ryusei, Agon-Kiriyama and (strangely) SGW Cups are also excluded. And it's for the Nihon Ki-in only. But what is most unusual about this event is the scoring system. It may interest the numbers guys.

It's a 2-day, 4-round Swiss for 16 players, not too fast, not too slow (NHK timing). The winner is the one with the most wins, obviously, but ranking of people with tied scores is done in a way that be old hat to the numbers guys, but is new to me, so I don't know the terminology.

The first tie-breaker is SOS - that one I know, Sum of Opponents' Scores (Okuda had the highest SOS, incidentally). But the tie-breaker after that is not SODOS (the only other one I know). It is the (?) SOSOS - Sum of Sums of Opponents' Scores.

Even if this is not new to western players, I think it is an interesting development where even pros are copying western amateur tournament practice, at least in spirit. (The simple Swiss goes back a long way in pro play, though, but only in women's events.)

PS SGW is the Tokyo real-estate company St. Grande W. The full title of the event describes it as a Golden Mean (chuyo) Tournament, which is just a posh (Confucian) way of saying it's for the middle-ranked players, or the also-rans. The winner is excluded from competing again but gets to come back as a commentator/honoured guest in future years. The SGW people were quite open about expressing their disappointment that Okuda didn't quite make it. (But this is the story of Okuda's go life so far - bridesmaid in four major women's events, never the bride.) They get the bang for their bucks with Youtube exposure on the TsuruRin Channel, which we mentioned somewhere on L19 before. Rin (Kanketsu) was the winner of the 1st SGW Cup.

Thanks for sharing, having more information on tournaments formats in use is interesting.

There is actually no need for these tie-breakers if they just want to choose a winner because a 4 round swiss with 16 players will have a unique winner because there are no draws.

I think (it is none of my business but still) that they'd do well to skip the tie-breakers and just share the prize money when there are ties. The final order in this tournament does depend on the third tie-breaker, for example 3rd and 4th place tie with 3 points and 8 sos points (if my calculations are correct) but it didn't matter if the third tie-breaker was SOSOS or SODOS.

From the point of view of the winner, a Swiss tournament (16 players) is like a knock-out tournament. Players who win play each other in the next round, and when you lose you can't win the tournament.

But SOS, SOSOS are not just tie-breakers to split a prize. Even if there is no prize, they serve a purpose: in the pairings of next round, you are going to play with somebody with similar results so far. Same number of victories (ie. points) and SOS as close as possible. The idea is to have a pairing as balanced as possible. That's why Okada, with 1 loss, had the best SOS: amongst the players with 3-1, she was the last one to lose, so she had the opponents with the best results.

Swiss or leagues allow players to play more games, even if losing one (*) means you are out of the fight. For players, depending on the format, it may mean to play once and good-bye till next year, or to play at least a few games. Fans, sometimes want blood, sometimes want to see their player play again.

(*) you can win a league with more than one loss, but many times the winner has (and needs) a perfect score

There are different ways to do pairings for Swiss tournaments. This tournament is using a pairing rule called "Monrad". With Monrad the pairing is done as follows: the players are first ranked by their score and then by the initial seed number. Then the the pairing is done from the top of the list by finding the next unpaired player as the opponent of the highest ranked unpaired player and ignoring already paired players. You can tell that this tournament used Monrad by checking were paired together in each round, it is always the closest pair according to score and initial seed.

When using Monrad in this way the winner will play exactly the same player as with a knock-out tournament. It is a nice feature.

There are other systems, for example "Dutch" which pairs in groups based on score but matches the top player in the group with the bottom player and so on, and in McMahon tournaments we often seem to use a pairing rules that are similar to what you described.

This weekend, we had the Wakakoi Battle (Hiroshima Aluminum Cup). 16 young players, 11 male, 4 female, +1, Fujisawa Rina, as the winner of last year. She was the first player to win a mixed tournament. It's a typical knock-out tournament. 30 sec/move + 10*1 min. NHK style, I think.

Well... this year, Fujisawa lost pretty soon, to Nishi Takenobu. So the current champion wouldn't defend the title.

Buuut... Ueno Asami was playing. Ueno Risa was playing too, but they didn't play each other. Would it have been the first official game between the sisters?
Well, as I was saying, Asami won the tournament, using her fighting skills. I watched the 3rd game, against Mutsuura Yuta... crazy. At the beggining of the game AI gave him 98% chance of winning, Asami had 2-3 weak groups, but she was attacking all the time and when the fight stopped, the situation was completely the opposite. Yuta's body language was astonishingly clear to me."what's going on? how did this happen?" I didn't know him, but being young and 7 dan, I thought he is a league player. And yes, this year he played in the A league of the Kisei, he has played in the Meijin league too... not a bad player.

The final game was against Nishi Takenobu. You just read about him. Ueno took revenge and won the title. Also a fighting game, but a less interesting one. They had played not long ago in the semifinal of the Shinjin O, again with Ueno winning it. He's gonna dream with her, and not the good kind.

You can see the broadcasting here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma0qkDV8ql0 1st day
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qemADrGyp2o 2nd day

Luckily, Ueno Asami's games are followed.

Here's an unusual insight.

In the latest Nihon Ki-in published figures (which go up to 22 October), they as usual give the number of wins the prime spot.

In first place is Ueno Asami on 42 wins in 2021. In 2nd place is Sumire, on 36. In joint 4th place is Rina on 34 wins. In 8th place is Nyu Eiko (30), in 9th place is Xie Yimin (29), and in joint 12th place - sharing that spot with no less than Iyama Yuta, is Kato Chie (28).Six women in the top 13!

I could go on: Suzuki Ayumi in joint 15th place 26), Hoshiai Shiho in joint 23rd (22). Top male, incidentally, is Fukuoka Kotaro, 3rd on 35, and Kyo Kagen is joint 4th with Rina.

Clearly something is afoot.

It's probably something to do with women now getting more playing opportunities than men (discrimination!), and we have to explain why the pattern is certainly not reflected in the less-favoured winning percentages table. Nevertheless, the women do feature there, with Rina in 5th place (75.6%) and Sumire in 12th (72.2%).

In terms of winning streaks, Sumire features twice in the top ten (separate streaks of 13 and 10). Rina has 11. Top is Ichiriki Ryo on 14. But even there there is a sea-change. There are ten players with streaks of 10 or more. In the not-too-distant past, a winning streak of 10+ was enough to win you immortal fame (e.g, Kitani Minoru - remember him?).

The lesson for all those who want to improve is obvious: wear a skirt.

Oh wow. I'm watching that now, and they seem to be playing at least four boards in a room, with talking clocks, so there is a constant cacophony of „juubyou“ „nijuubyou“ etc. (»ten seconds«, »twenty seconds«). That's quite some noise.

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

The saga continues, with a new landmark.

Ueno Asami has won the 16th Young Carp Tournament, beating a male in every round, and so this is the first co-ed tournament won by a female in successive years. The fella she beat in the final was ranked higher than her at 5-dan but she also beat a 4-dan and two 6-dans (she is 4-dan). Her 1-dan sister was also in the event and got to Round 1. Sumire was absent - because of school work probably.

One thing the Japanese maybe need to work on is their hotel names. There seems to be a plethora of supposedly "cool" hotels that look flash but are really just jumped-up youth hostels with weird names. I stayed at one on my last visit to Tokyo with my grandson. Hated it. Full of young people.

The Young Carp was played in what appears to be a similar joint: the Hotel Mystays in Hiroshima Peace Park. I'm afraid the image that evoked in my mind, from the time I was very young - too young to be "cool" even - was aunts trying on their new corsets.

Incidentally, Asami has the nickname Hammer. I gather this comes from her (male) pals in her study group. She once had a style of seeking for a balance of territories while attacking judiciously. Now her colleagues have noticed an addition. She plays moves that makes them feel as if she has crept up behind them and hit them with a hammer.

So, with Christmas prezzies in mind, all those fellas out there who want to improve should tell Santa what go accessories they now need: a skirt and a claw hammer. Ideal for playing on the internet, I suppose.

Yeah, well, young people creep in everywhere. You keep find more and more of them little creeps.

How-ever... Did your grandkid enjoy it?



Nah... Claymores trump hammers any day. Specially with the right skirt.

Take care

_________________
一碁一会

Mutsuura Yuta, the 3rd round victim, is 7 dan.




So it's a real thing? I often see "hammer" in twitter (in Japanese). But I thought it was some kind of mistake with the automatic translation.
I can understand the nickname.

Speaking of hammering, I often see a hammer prop in NHK Go materials. Maybe it's some in-joke? There's Asami's "Hammer Punch" (ハンマーパンチ) also: https://twitter.com/nagoya_amigo/status ... 4791091206

Meanwhile, Shimojima Yohei uses the hammer to happily build a house in his Go course.