TMark wrote:
I am happy to say that this would not work. The sponsors in the Far East will issue invitations to the national organisations which are members of the EGF and the IGF. In no way are they going to deal with a Korean club in LA and a Chinese club in San Francisco; they have to deal with the recognised national organisation, which has to establish criteria for its members on how they will qualify for the benefit.
This year, I went to the WAGC as the representative of the British Go Association. Unfortunately, it meant that I would miss one round of the qualifying tournaments for the British national championship and would have to re-qualify for the next year. The BGA contacted me to find out whether I would complain about the scheduling, because of the extra effort and cost that I would have to put in. I was amazed; I was getting a trip to China to represent my country, and they thought that I might have some complaints about minor, petty qualification rules! Get real! If you want to take part in events like tournaments in Japan. China and Korea, the qualification rules are a very minor irritant along the way.
Best wishes.
Well, first of all, it's really not just two clubs. They're scattered around the country, you'll likely only have heard of the LA one because of the Cotsen, and the San Francisco one because they're active in the AGA and Mingjiu is there.
Secondly, I didn't think my gedanken experiment would produce results. The purpose of the rhetorical question was to illustrate that the AGA has a natural monopoly on tournament seats.
Finally, those qualification rules aren't petty if the players are not part of the AGA system.
10 games a year and continuous membership forces strong players from those small clubs to participate regularly in an organization that they know very little about for a year solidly, in order to be able to represent their country abroad.
I'm sure many would feel that this is justified, that this serves as a useful carrot to get them to join the AGA. Personally, I feel that if they're willing to help defray the cost of the qualifier and travel, they're strong enough, and they're American, this should be enough.
I wouldn't call this "idealistic", I'd call it pragmatic: bring in more players and increase the level of our qualifiers, while defraying additional costs. Further, I would argue that creating that year buffer loses an opportunity to get them involved.
They're not going to say "Hey, some round-eye just told me about a qualifier, we can wait a year and play in next years tournament if we join the AGA and start going to their tournaments regularly".
We need to find ways for the AGA community and those cultural communities to overlap at events. If we had an open qualifying system, we could send out, for example, a qualifier announcement in the Korean/Chinese newspapers around the country, giving the price for AGA-members and non-AGA members. And then just see who shows up.
This takes advantage of the impulse-buying phenomenon. Get them to see something and have an opportunity, right away, to go after it. We shouldn't temper that with a year.
And then, when you hook them, then you can start feeding other things their way: Merchandise, Tournaments, Pro Lectures. That's the real cash-cow, Not the vanishingly small group of AGA memberships that won't lapse for a couple months as a result of these rules.
Tactics yes, Tact no...
