Nordisk GoBlad. 7 Feb 2005

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1 Nordisk GoBlad Nr 1 7 Feb 2005 Hmmm... Vad händer med stegen? Se sidan 12. Innehåll 2 Go-players density in european countries 3 Nordisk mesterskab i go i påsken Arctic Go 8 Go in Finland 9 7 problemer 10 US Go Congress Også proffer gjør tabber 13 Svenska Pokalen Jusandan Catalin och Saijo sensei i Stockholm i oktober 18 Ett parti från EM i Tuchola 20 Vinter vikingetogter i det nordtyske 21 Norgesmesterskapet i Go Sic transit gloria mundi 26 Goklubbar i Norden 28 Nordiska goförbund 28 Henry Kissinger on Go Nordisk GoBlad 1 / 2005

2 Go-players density in european countries Simon Gemel Dear Go-friends: For those who are interested - I made a table of a so called Go-players-density of European countries. A kind of measurement of popularity of Go. E.g. it s quite clear, that there are more Go-players in Germany than in Luxemburg, because one country is much bigger than the other one. But if you take the population of all the countries and divide them by the number of Go-players, which are registrated from EGF by tournament-participation within the last 2 years, you get numbers with which you can compare countries easier. I already did this last year, so that there can be done some interesting comparison to this year. Greetings from Austria Dec 2003 Dec 2004 Country Population No of Go-density-factor** Rank No ofplayers* players* Go-densityfactor** Finland Luxemburg Slovenia Czechia Sweden Lithuania Netherlands Switzerland Germany Andorra Slovakia France Romania Poland Hungary Austria Belgium Croatia Norway Denmark U Kingdom Yugoslavia Rank Spain Iceland Ireland Italy Estonia ?? Ukraine Macedonia Nordisk GoBlad 1 / 2005

3 Russia Turkey Portugal Cyprus ?? Armenia Latvia Belarus * No of go-players: Go-players which were recorded from EGF thru tournament-particapation in the last 2 years ** Go-density-factor: Population divided by Go-players defined above. E.g. in Dec 04 every th European was recorded from EGF thru tournament-participation Nordisk mesterskab i go i påsken 2005 Odense Go Klub indbyder til det åbne nordiske mesterskab i go i påskedagene 25. marts 27. marts 2005 Der spilles 6 runder McMahon. Komi er 6½. Betænkningstiden 90 minutter og byoyomi 15 sten på 5 minutter. Spillested: Bolbro Brugerhus, Stadionvej 50,Odense V Tidsplan: Fredag Registrering Velkomst og praktiske oplysninger runde runde Lørdag runde runde Søndag Sommertiden begynder! (uret stilles 1 time frem) runde runde Præmieoverrækkelse Indskud er 100 danske kr., der dækker præmier samt kaffe og te under hele turneringen. Der kan købes billig mad på spillestedet. Bolbro Brugerhus er åbent for gospillere fra torsdag den 24. marts kl. 18 til mandag den 27. marts kl. 10. Der vil være mulighed for gratis men primitiv overnatning i Brugerhuset. Husk sovesager og liggeunderlag! Tilmelding med oplysning om styrke samt om der ønskes overnatning i Brugerhuset sendes eller mailes senest 19. marts 2005 til : John Nielsen, Ved Vejgården 30, DK 5270 Odense N, johnerling@mail.tele.dk Nordisk GoBlad 1 / 2005

4 Arctic Go Basti Weidemyr The game of Go has only recently conquered the Swedish part of Sapmi. This is the reason to why the region's strongest player has yet to receive a rank of 1 kyu. However, there are other strengths in the region. For instance, some of us are easily 1 dan at daydreaming. Go and daydreaming, two arts that befit a gentleman, can safely be expected to flourish in a part of the world where golf is confined to the snowless month of July. Blending these, you may arrive at the perfect concretization of creativity and perfectionism, or at an experience similar to the one that mr Donald Duck has to go through every Friday the 13th. I speak about the go tournament. In the following couple of pages, I will take you through my and my fellows' experience with arranging our first go tournament. It all started with a simple observation. Our nearest tournament was either Jusan Dan in Stockholm, or Siljan Go in Leksand, both 1000 km away. It was obvious that somebody ought to do something. The club had 15 members and I made the mistake of suggesting that we should hold an open tournament. Everyone agreed and most of us pledged to help with the organization. One member of the club, who disappeared two months before the tournament, suggested the name Arctic Go. A date in November was chosen, after carefully checking that it did not collide with other events, and invitations were sent out. Everyone expected me to provide leadership and take initiatives, maybe because I dared to suggest a tournament. I tried to squeeze back by suggesting that we formed a committee with a chairman and a secretary but, as expected, nobody accepted a position on it. So unfortunately, I had to accept total responsibility. I would have been better off without a tournament at all. It was a blunder, like becoming engaged with two ladies at the same time or playing the first move of a gote sequence when you could have captured a big dragon from your opponent. However, bitterness earns you no friends so I shouldered my burden and went to work. The two most important issues were deemed to be getting a rental agreement and an agreement for borrowing game clocks from the chess club. I contacted a guy from the chess club and he replied "Nemasproblemas". I thought I knew the meaning of that word but I am no longer sure. Turning to the hosting, we had four requirements for the facility: participants must be able to sleep there; there must be toilets; there must be an Internet connection (with an IP-number, not DHCP) and it has to be big enough for 15 tables. We found one contender. It won. With one and a half month left, the author went to see the headmaster for Midskogsskolan. The headmaster could not recall where he had put his template for the rental agreement so he asked me to come back one week later. Next time, he explained that he would never find the template, so he needed some time to make a new one. "Can you call next week?" With less than month left, I called and got this response. "That is not the most important thing I am doing right now." We met again after one week. This time, we brought one prewritten agreement each. Proposition 1 When working with people who are employed by the government, be sure to allocate at least three times more time to the task, than should be required. The agreement stressed particularly one clause, which is not even needed in Europe - that of principal responsibility. It means that if someone destroys something, unless it can be established who did it, you will have to pay the damage. In my case, since I have no money, it would probably mean to give up my engineering studies. With more than twenty participants, my future looked bleak indeed Nordisk GoBlad 1 / 2005

5 - 5 - Nordisk GoBlad 1 / 2005

6 Proposition 2 Do not tell mom. I opened an ICQ-conversation with the guy from the chess club again two weeks before the tournament. Doubts were growing in my mind (and that is a place where they will never run out of nutrition), so I asked him to explain the meaning of "nemasproblemas". He said, "if I am responsible and no one is going to use them, there should be no trouble". He was not responsible. Our go club consists mostly of people who work with computers at least five hours per day. Some are teh 1337, some are hackers, some are geeks and some are nerds. With this magnificent flora of occupations and backgrounds, one month before the tournament when we had scheduled to run a broadcasting test, I was eager to explore what our team had come up with in terms of web-tv, advertisement creatives and information management systems to cover the tournament. Not even an intro, it turned out. I did my best to stress how important preparations were. We decided that the test should be carried out on Sunday one week before the tournament. We also agreed on exactly what should be done before that. It was a project with very much down-scaled ambitions but still, the first radio broadcast by Reginald Fessenden was not remembered for its good quality or cool intro. It was historic, and so would the 1st Arctic Go have been. Luleå is a cold place. During the winter, the temperature usually ranges between 5 degrees and -30. You would not want to spend a second beyond what is necessary outdoors. As I suffer from the sick building syndrome, which gets more serious when I am freezing, for me, it is even more important to stay indoors and eat and sleep regularly. Attending every club meeting was a heavy burden which added to the weight of going around to various places in Luleå in order to get things done. If I had been well, things would have been easier. Doubting that we would manage to broadcast anything at all, I decided to cancel our attempts to sign up a sponsor. Proposition 3 Be well. It was two weeks before the tournament and we were blessed with four problems. We had no demo-board for the seminar, no car driver (or car), no printer and no percolator. We did not even have one single member of the club who knew how to make coffee. Even if most gentlemen and intellectuals prefer Jolt cola, there is still a small but vocal fragment left who demands coffee, so it was apparently a serious matter and we failed completely. The most senior member of the club was a great help to me during this period. His experience was valuable and it was his idea to ask the porters of the school for a whiteboard. He had a printer too. However since he was moving at the time, it was hard to find. It emerged that another one of our members had a working printer at home and he promised to bring it. I told him to test it carefully but he said there was no need for testing because he knew it was working. With one week left it was time to test our broadcasting organization. We would also try out the computer program which would be used for the pairings, MacMahon. I instructed the guy who would run the program, to read about how it works and to simulate a tournament at home, in order to see to it that there would arise no problems. He did. However, it was just a small one and a small tournament is not quite the same as a big one. On Sunday noon, most of the club had gathered around a table in the B-house, at the university, where we usually play on Sundays. The guy who would bring the camera, however, did not show up and he could not be reached by phone. Another club member went home to fetch his camera. Once he returned, we found out that it could not work with any of our laptops. With just an hour left, we run a nigiri-tournament with six participants. Not enough to test MacMahon but better than nothing. Proposition 4 Take the most overzealous member of the club and tell him (for it is a him) to spend night and day, for at least a year, on learning the MacMahon program. It turned out that the guy who could not be reached had overslept himself. The days immediately before the first Arctic were spent on fetching the game timers and purchasing food. 120 cans of lemonade/cola, 100 kroner worth of fruit, and chocolate, cookies and more were stockpiled. In Skåne (Scania), where I come from, we have a saying that the key to a successful event is good food, lots of food and food in its right time. We made this a priority. It turned Friday afternoon and it was time to lay out the 100m ethernet cable that would connect us to the Internet. Without boring you with the details it suffice to say that the guy with the laptop had forgotten to bring his computer, so we could not Nordisk GoBlad 1 / 2005

7 check that the connection actually worked. Also we had been told to connect the cable to port 10. Now, there were two routers, each with a port 10, so we had an approximate 40 percent chance. The connection was provided by the IT-office of the municipal government and of course, they left their office while we scrambled a laptop. The connection did not work. See proposition 1 again. At around 23:30, our driver arrived from Piteå. We went to my apartment immediately and fetched the food, lemonade and game timers. In the haste, I forgot two packs of cookies in the refrigerator. As I could not sleep during the night, I decided to go home and fetch them. I had been given a security card by the porters. As expected, it did not work when it should. So I found myself outside in the -17 degrees C at half past five in the morning. I tried to call the guy with the printer but he did not wake up. After calling a heap of numbers finally I received help. On Saturday morning, after a tai-qi show and a chaotic registration, when the pairings were being made, the person who was appointed to learn the MacMahon program asked me how we should configure the initial MacMahon scores. I suggested two stones per MacMahon score and he asked "How do I do that?" After some trial and error, we found a set up that seemed to work. It had just three MacMahon levels, and 9 kyus were paired with 1 dans, but it did produce a pairing. We were 30 minutes late and with a slightly desperate tone I hissed "Print this!". "Yes, we need to install the printer first, though", came the reply. "What? Is it not installed?!" "It will be a quick procedure." After maybe ten minutes I began to ask questions. I turned to the guy who brought the printer. "Did I not tell you to test it?" "But it works", he replied. "I see no paper coming out of it." "That is correct, however, it is because the drivers do not work with the laptop, so I can promise that the printer works." "Turn the computer around and let people read from the screen!" "Wait we can try to.." Proposition 5 Make it clear to all of the organizers that the day before the tournament is for preparations and technical issues - - not for playing go. Make it clear, also, that the rounds are for playing go -- not for dealing with technical issues. "Ahem, we do not have round two. Somebody forgot to push the record button." It is a little bit hard to actually blame someone for neglecting their appointments when you suspect that it is intentional. Next, someone found out that we had no more than 4GB left on the hard disk. One of us went home and fetched an ethernet cable so that we could transfer files between our laptops. I missed most of the seminar because I went to bed, but the TV-group explained that the sound recording did not work so the only sound we had was that from the microphone which was built into the camera. Michael Yao, 5d, was not impressed by the sound quality. "Ahem, after we copied round 1 and 3, it seems they were never removed from the hard disk, so we have just the first hour of round 4." The Sunday turned out to be mostly problem-free -- no terror attacks or natural disasters, not even an earth quake. The clean-up afterwards, went smoothly too. The seminar, however, caused lots of trouble. It had to be copied in pieces because the hard disk was broken in the middle of it. We spent days on trying to copy it before we succeeded. Proposition 6 Use a back-up if possible. Despite the lack of planning and preparation in the areas of web-tv coverage, it would be unreasonable to describe the 1st Arctic Go as a failure. Our primary objectives were to introduce tournament go to a part of the world where it has never been played before, and to create an environment in which players from Northern Finland and Northern Sweden can meet, make friends and get to know each other. This happened. Broadcasting a tournament like Arctic Go on the Internet is not too hard. All you need is some equipment, some experience with computers and a couple of days of preparations. Our attempt was thwarted by a lack of engagement on the part of the computer savvy among us. Some club members did not want to take any initiatives because they presumed that there were others in the club that would do it better. Some of these "others" may have reasoned that "it would be cool if we managed to get a broadcast out but nobody would have watched it anyway and I am not going to waste my day on actually making it work". This stood in stark contrast to the efforts made by most of us, who helped organize the event. Many of our club members are very young and may Nordisk GoBlad 1 / 2005

8 have been inexperienced. In retrospect, however, our club was probably too small to handle the broadcasting part. For there are different kinds of go players. Some are serious about go. Some are serious in general. And some are just not serious at all. We need all these people. Together we make up the European go community and it needs to grow. Being a part of this community should not in itself imply a commitment. However, the most valuable members of the go community are those who are willing to commit themselves to bringing life to the sport by arranging tournaments and spending time on the administration of their clubs. Thank you very much, all who helped with the organization of the 1st Arctic Go and all who have helped with the organization of go tournaments this year. May your groups never run out of liberties. At a bus stop outside a shopping mall, I met one of our newest club members, who disappeared a month before the 1st Arctic Go. His eyes were wide open as if he was high with ecstasy. "I am sorry that I could not come to Arctic Go. I have had better things to do.", he said as he went aboard the bus. You have to forgive him his blasphemous remarks. New to the game as he is, he has not yet grasped the full width and depth of the benefit that this art is blessing its practitioners with. Presumably, he had spent this time with his girlfriend. One must ask, however, why he did not bring her to the tournament? If she is a prudent young woman with a mind for beauty and arts, surely, she will appreciate it even more than you and I. If you have not yet made up your mind, remember, it is better not to marry at all than to marry in gote. Go in Finland Matti Siivola Autumn 2004 About a dozen events are listed in the Finnish go Calendar since the last Nordisk GoBlad. The Finnish championship was won for the fourth year in a row by Vesa Laatikainen, 5 dan. Second was Matti Siivola, 5 dan. For the first time in twelve years a new player entered the top three. He was Kare Jantunen 3 dan. Oulu hosted several tournaments, first the Minds Sports Festival and then Oulu championship including two qualification tournaments. Antti Törmänen dominated the tournaments. No one from Finland went to Tasllinn tournament as we heard about it only afterwards. The major international tournament in Finland was Toyota IGS-Pandanet Europan Go Tour at Tampere. There were 62 players including 6 dans from Hungary and Russia. There were also foreign players from Estonia and Germany. Unfortunately all the preregistered swedes cancelled their trip. The tournament was won by Diana Köszegi and the 9 by 9 free paired side tournament by Antti Törmänen. Nine Finns went to London Open Go Congress. Their tournament was successful as they scored 48 wins out of 72 games and earned three dan level promotions. Teemu Rovio and Suvi Leppänen won the Pair Go tournament Nordisk GoBlad 1 / 2005

9 7 problemer Pål Sannes Problemene denne gang er alle hentet fra den nylige utkomne boka Liping Huangs Problem Series, Volume 1 (vel, hefte er nok en bedre betegnelse). Sant å si har jeg visse problemer med å forstå hvorfor denne boka er gitt ut. Ingen av løsningene har medfølgende tekst, og ingen varianter annen enn hovedvarianten er gitt. Slik sett vil man ha (minst) like stort utbytte av å kjøpe en av de mange problembøkene som er utgitt på japansk, koreansk eller kinesisk. Dessuten synes jeg forfatterne Liping Huang og hennes datter Nancy Xu ikke alltid har lykkes med å plassere de 114 problemene i riktig bås blant valgene Elementary, Immediate and Advanced Level. Spesielt ville jeg ha byttet om plasseringen av flere av problemene i de to siste kategoriene. Men etter såpass mye negativt omtale: problemene er alle interessante og kan sies å være aktuelle for virkelige partier, og for de som liker å løse problemer vil dette være nok en kjærkommen bok å pløye seg igjennom. I alle problemene er sort i trekket og oppgaven er å drepe hvit, i siste problem via ko. Problem 1-4 er hentet fra Elementary level, problem 5-7 fra Intermediate level (selv om jeg selv definitivt ville plassert de to siste under Advanced level) Løsning på sidan Nordisk GoBlad 1 / 2005

10 US Go Congress 2004 Pål Sannes Noe av det mest attraktive med de europeiske Go-kongressene er det faktum at man hvert år blir kjent med et nytt land og en ny by. En glimrende anledning til å kombinere det å være turist med den flotteste hobbyen som finnes! For min del er det nå blitt i tur og orden siden 1995: Tuchola (Polen), Abano (Italia), Marseilles (Frankrike), Mamaia (Romania), Podbanske (Slovakia), Strausberg (Tyskland), Dublin (Irland), Zagreb (Kroatia) og så i fjor: St. Petersburg (Russland). En ganske så imponerende 'merittliste' å vise fram for venner og jobbkolleger. I år var imidlertid EM lagt til Tuchola igjen. Personlig er jeg litt betenkt over å tillate at EM skal kunne arrangeres på samme sted innenfor et såpass kort tidsintervall. Men for min del betød dette en ypperlig anledning til å gjøre noe jeg har ønsket i flere år, men ikke har kunnet på grunn av kollisjon med EM: å delta i den amerikanske Gokongressen! Egentlig er jeg svært overrasket over at ikke langt flere europeere har tenkt likedan. For årets US Go Congress kunne ikke vært stort bedre lokalisert for de av oss som ikke har vært på østkysten av USA før: i byen Rochester lengst nord i staten New York. Ikke det at selve Rochester var så interessant. Men det naturlige er først å ta fly til New York, noe som ikke lenger er så dyrt som det en gang brukte å være, deretter tog den siste biten fram. Og hvilken liste over severdigheter jeg rakk innom i de 5 dagene jeg hadde avsatt til sightseeing i New York før og etter kongressen: Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, World Trade Center (det som er igjen av det!), Wall Street, Brooklyn Bridge, FN-bygningen, Central Park, Guggenheimer Museum, samt de to internasjonalt mindre kjente men langt bedre besøkte og etter min mening langt mer interessante museumene Metropolitan Museum og National Museum of Natural History. Bare for å ta det mest kjente av det jeg rakk innom! Og på toppen av det hele: fridagen onsdag under turneringen ble brukt til en organisert utflukt til Niagara Falls, en drøy times busstur unna spillestedet. Feng Yun Så nå kan dere angre. En som ikke angrer, er Ulf Olsson, som ved siden av meg selv var den eneste nordiske deltakeren på kongressen. Dessuten var det med to engelske 4-danere: David Ward og T Mark Hall, og vi holdt da også mye sammen under kongressen. For min del var det en ganske spesiell opplevelse når vi første spilledag traff på Feng Yun, en av to kvinnelige proffspillere som har nådd graden 9 dan, og som derfor er en spiller som man umiddelbart føler stor respekt overfor. Hun bor nå i New Jersey i USA hvor hun har opprettet en egen Go-skole som virkelig blomstrer for tiden. Det viste seg at hun kjente både Ulf, David og T Mark godt fra før, så det utviklet seg til en lang samtale som jeg hadde det privilegium å følge med i. Ikke minst imponerte det meg hvor rett fram og liketil hun var i sin framferd, der hun sto i sine joggesko og fullstendig fri for enhver form for makeup eller annet jåleri. I følge Ulf har hun alltid vært likedan; han ble kjent med henne da hun for mange år siden besøkte Sverige hvor hun bodde hos Ulf og Yvonne (hun var 5p den gang). En uke Hvordan arter så en amerikansk Gokongress seg? Mye ligner selvsagt på den europeiske Gokongressen. Motsvarigheten til EM er US Open, som arrangeres med 1 runde hver formiddag. Til sammen 6 runder, ettersom den amerikanske kongressen strekker seg over kun en uke, med spillefri onsdagen. Betenkningstiden er litt kortere for de sterkere spillerne: 2 timer basistid for de over eller lik 4 dan, 1 1/2 time for de under. Personlig synes jeg dette er en mer passe betenkningstid enn det som benyttes under EM; det gjør det lettere å beholde overskudd til å delta i de mange andre aktivitetene som holdes utover ettermiddagen og kvelden (mye likt her som i den europeiske kongressen), samtidig som det likevel gir anledning til å tenke dypere i hvert parti enn hva vi får anledning til i vanlige helgeturneringer. En turneringsform som er unik for US-kongressen er den såkalte 'Continuous Self-Paired Tournament'. Her velger du selv dine motstandere, spiller med forgaver svarende til styrkeforskjellen, og blir enig med din motstander om spilletid, som dog minst må være 30 minutter i basistid (45 minutter var det anbefalte), svarende til minimumskravet for å få partiet AGA-rated. David ble litt lettere oppgitt da han ble utfordret til et parti med 18 forgavesteiner av Nordisk GoBlad 1 / 2005

11 en kyu-spiller og senere fant ut at dette partiet (som han tapte) talte akkurat like mye for AGA-ratingen hans som det partiet han tidligere på dagen i US Open hadde slitt seg nesten helseløs for å vinne mot en 5 dan. Premier I god amerikansk ånd ble det delt ut en rekke premier i denne turneringen. Hør bare: The Champion: The player who records the greatest number of wins over losses Hurricane: The player who records the greatest number of wins Giant Killer: The kyu player who wins the most games against dan players (also know as the "Dan Killer" award) Keith Arnold Award: The dan player who scores the most wins against kyu players (also known as the "Kyu Killer" award) Grasshopper: The player whose provisional rating increases the most during the tournament. Straight Shooter: The player who scores the most victories against players of consecutive ranks Dedicated: The player with the highest number of total games in the tournament Sensei: The participant who plays the most games against weaker players Faithful: The player with the smallest change in provisional rating during the tournament Philanthropist: The player with the most loses. Optimist: The player whose provisional rating decreases the most during the tournament Profesjonelle spillere Amerikanerne er helt klart bedre enn oss i Europa til å ta vare på og utnytte profesjonelle spillere. Hver eneste dag ble det avholdt en mengde simultanpartier og minst 3 leksjoner, av og til på sammenfallende tidspunkt, så det var ikke alltid like lett å velge. Det var helt tydelig at proffene stortrivdes, og det var da også hele 15 av dem til stede. Det ble avholdt en egen turnering (Ing American Pro Tournament) for 4 av proffene som lever i USA. Disse hadde på forhånd måttet kvalifisere seg for denne turneringen: det har som kjent etter hvert bosatt seg et anseelig antall profesjonelle Gospillere fra Kina, Korea og Japan i USA, og flere av disse forsøker fremdeles å lage seg et levebrød av å spille og undervise Go. Flere av leksjonene var gjennomgang av partier som ble spilt i denne turneringen, som for øvrig ble vunnet av Feng Yun. Min personlige favoritt blant foredragsholderne var Yang Yilun 7p, forfatteren bak blant annet de utmerkede bøkene 'Whole Board Thinking in Joseki' (bind 1 og 2) og 'Sabaki'. MacMahon Turneringssystemet i US Open var derimot en historie for seg. Det stod i innbydelsen at dette skulle være en MacMahon-turnering, men det viste seg at dette var en helt annen variant av MacMahon enn det vi er vant til i Europa. På resultatlisten var det ingen kolonne for MMS, SOS eller tilsvarende, derimot en for 'current band'. Utrolig nok var det ingen jeg spurte som kunne forklare meg hva dette stod for, selv ikke min motstander i første runde som hadde vært med i samtlige 20 US-kongresser som har vært arrangert. Ingen så ut til å bry seg heller. Betegnende var følgende svar jeg fikk: "den som har laget trekningsprogrammet har sikkert gjort dette helt ubetalt, og da er det ikke riktig av oss å plage ham med detaljer". Utvilsomt en ganske annen holdning enn den vi finner i Europa! Etter hvert fant vi ut at 'current band' faktisk svarer til MMS, men at de har 2 MMS-punkter mellom hver styrkegrad. I tillegg må de ha lagt inn parametere som gjør at parringer mellom samme styrkegrad begunstiges. Selv etter å ha vunnet alle mine 5 første partier (og var alene blant 4 danerne i dette), fant jeg meg selv trukket mot en 4 dan i siste runde (fikk riktignok møte en 5 dan spiller i løpet av turneringen, i 5. runde). Nemlig Ulf. Han vant vårt innbyrdes oppgjør, og vi endte opp med å ta de to første plassene i 4 dan-seksjonen, begge med 5-1 uttelling, med Ulf først. Hva som egentlig skilte oss vet vi fortsatt ikke, ettersom det aldri kom opp noen resultatliste etter siste runde, og vi har til dags dato heller ikke funnet noen resultatliste på nettet. Men AGA-rating har vi fått: her er Ulf igjen den beste av oss med ganske så smigrende 5.97 i rating. Det er tydelig at amerikanske dan-spillere er minst en halv stein overranket i forhold til europeiske dan-spillere, og i etterkant (spesielt hvis vi hadde visst om de ovennevte særegenhetene i trekningssystemet) er det klart at vi heller burde stilt opp i 5 dan-seksjonen. En pussighet ved trekningslistene som ble slått opp for hver runde var at denne var sortert alfabetisk, hvor du til høyre for ditt eget navn fant farge (sort eller hvitt), bordnummer samt navn og styrkegrad for din motstander. Dette systemet har utvilsomt den fordel framfor den vi er vant til at du raskere finner fram til hvor og med hvem du skal spille mot, men er langt mer upraktisk hvis du ønsker å finne ut navnene på for eksempel de som spiller på bordet ved siden av. Alt i alt var den amerikanske Gokongressen en opplevelse som på det sterkeste kan anbefales! Nordisk GoBlad 1 / 2005