Just a curiosity, but are they going to use the system they've used this year every year? Or will they switch to having a specified pro exam?

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Slava Ukraini!

I believe the way it works is 2 players from the cotsen, 1 from seattle, 1 from maryland then 7 from the tygem online qualifier. That makes 11. The last 5 will be filled by seeded players. The seeded players will be top ranking AGA and CGA amateurs. Though I'm not 100% sure how they figure out who is seeded and I'm not sure who the seeded players are. I'm not even sure the players themselves know if they are seeded or not

Reading this gave me a headache. And it all just seems rather convoluted. Hopefully they'll switch to a round robin format next year.

If necessary, have a prelim tournament with the lower ranked members of the AGA and CGA, and simply have #x seeds to qualify automatically for the main tournament, and then allow the top #y seeds advance from the prelims.

The only problem I foresee with round robin is the amount of time that it would take, and that may be time people do not have. So if time is a detracting factor, maybe swiss. If swiss doesn't work either, double or single elimination might work. Actually, thinking on this further, maybe swiss really would be the better option. It would always pit the winners against each other until the end. And that way if people who have no chance of winning drop out, it wouldn't be as devastating or result altering. I say this with the thought process that players winning wouldn't normally drop out. Also swiss is generally a lot faster than round robin.

At the end of the day, it could be time consuming, but if you're attempting to become a professional, shouldn't it be?

Say you have 100 entrants for the tournament. Automatically seed the top 16 for the main tournament based on organization standing (Maybe 8 for AGA, 8 for CGA). And then allow 16 more to advance from the 84 in the prelims.

Then the main tournament could be single elimination with the top one or two becoming pros.

Just an idea though. And again, that is very time consuming, so maybe having the prelims take place on the internet over a period of time would be more time efficient.

And then you could have the main tournament of 32 take place at the annual Go congress.

32, 16, 8, 4, 2. You could complete the main tournament in 5 days with pool of 32 players in a single elimination tournament. Or if you wanted a pool of 64, it would last 10 days, or maybe a little more with a bye day here and there.

Obviously this is off topic, but this could work. The thought of having amateur events enabling folks to compete for pro qualification seems a bit odd to me, especially if the winners have no ambition to become pro. I have no idea if there is already a plan in place for next year, but this is just my thought process.

At the end of the day, I really know nothing about the inner workings of these things, and I don't pretend to, so feel free to ignore this as simple noise.

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Slava Ukraini!

I have a feeling much of it comes down to practicality. To try and organize several new events around the country and field a strong turnout would require quite a bit of time and effort, as well as maintaining some sort of organizational staff. It is much simpler to support existing tournaments that already draw well and have them double as a qualifier. This also removes the possibility that you might cannibalize regional tournaments (that is, if you organize an independent Northwest region qualifier, players may decide that have enough time and budget to do one tournament, so they choose either the qualifier or the Seattle's tournament...hurting the turnout for both events). This is perhaps similar to say, qualifying for the Boston Marathon. Instead of trying to do their own qualifiers, they accept times from other events in other areas (Philly, LA, etc).

Well, going back over what I said, I highly doubt this would disrupt other events for 2 primary reasons.

1. The bulk of the tournament would be the prelims which would take place online.

2. If the primary tournament takes place at the US Go Congress (like this year), the players would already be there.

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Slava Ukraini!

Neither of these reasons are particularly persuasive.

First and foremost, why not use this process to support existing events? Having just ruined my holiday weekend running the Maryland Open, it was great to have 6 and 7 dan players from as far away as California, Canada and New York attend my event and make it worthy qualifier with a worthy champion. I confess the strong player and general dan level turnout exceeded my expectations, and I appreciate the opportunity and confidence the AGA placed in my event. I was correspondingly disapointed by the number of kyu players however - this event is for everyone - in fact, it would have been nice to see you haithorne (as it was nice to see Mef - whose story of his truncated appearance would be worthy of comment, but I will leave it up to him to do so....)

Second - an online tournament does disrupt the local events - even if they do not directly conflict - people have only so many free weekends and travel cost and general inertia give online events an advantage.

Third - Strong players at the Congress make for a strong US Open field - and this is disrupted if you take out dozens of the strongest players.

A pro system cannot be sustained without go players to support it with interest AND money. This money may come from sponsors, but sponsors will only invest, if they think there is value in their investment. I am not sure folks playing and watching online for free count, or at least count fully. The population sponsors want and therefore our pros are going to need are the ones that spend the time, gas, hotel bills and entrance fees to actually attend events and make there fandom apparent and not virtual.

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My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle

Prelims usually aren't huge anyway. It's the main tournament that is the main thing, and that would be available to people who attended the US Go Congress. Like I said, it was just an idea. And continuing that thought process, I also said I had no idea about the inner workings of these things.

I strongly believe the pro exam should be separate, though. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's just my opinion.

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Slava Ukraini!

If the seeded players don't know they are seeded, maybe some of them have already played in qualifiers. In which case, if they lost, would they lose their seed? That doesn't make any sense. Maybe seeding is the wrong term. Maybe what's really going to happen is they are going to see who shows up in NC and try to track down other strong players there who are willing to fill out as much of the 16 as possible so there can be a proper-looking final tournament.

This has been exactly what I've seen for the North American Masters Tournaments previously.

It's a time issue. A serious tournament (even "just a prelim") will require players commit at least a full weekend to participate, whether they are traveling to Maryland or playing online. As most people have only so much time they are willing to dedicate to go, having to commit a weekend to an online go qualifier will make them much less likely to play in a regular tournament that falls around the same time. I've heard that this has already become an issue for tournament attendance near schools participating in the online Collegiate Go League (which organizes matches between schools every other weekend). There's a 50% chance your tournament collides with a CGL match, and even if it doesn't college students only have so many weekend hours they can give up. The result is fewer college kids at your tournament.

The effect on including the pro qualifier as part of congress would perhaps be even more devastating. Currently the field of strong players has US Open in the morning, and North American Masters in the evening (or Strong Players' Open for those who don't qualify for NAMT). Adding a fourth strong players' tournament means you are guaranteed to completely gut the field of strong amateurs on at least one if not more of these tournaments.

As the current system stands, attending both the pro qualifier and congress involves doubling your time commitment (means taking two weeks out of your life instead of just one). Even being in the same place, I can't help but think that will have an effect on the turn out, two weeks of serious go tournaments is a lot of time, money, and effort.

I still disagree with this system, but that's just my opinion.

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Slava Ukraini!

So looking at the results so far, the strongest Amateurs not already in are Michael Chen, Eric Lui, Jie Li, and Yuan Zhou? I'll be curious to see how the tournament fills out. After that, I will be curious who then participates in North American Masters and US Open.

Also pro tournament not scheduled on http://www.gocongress.org/2012/tournaments?

http://www.usgo.org/news/2012/05/maryla ... n-kgs-now/

This says two will qualify from online. It's not official however.

The pro tournament is the week prior ( 7/28 - 8/4), at the same time as the go symposium.





Personally I would guess that the number of qualifiers from the online tournament will depend on how many they get to sign up. If the tournament is really only 3 rounds, they could easily end up with 7 qualifiers. In fact, with the way to tournament appears to be set up, it could be very, very hard to get just 7 qualifiers. You will have the initial pool of anyone in the AGA who wants a pin, say you get 50 people, half eliminated in round 1. In Round 2, along with the 25 remaining you have 6d+ players who got a bye, lets say you have 5 more people* from this, bringing your current total to 30. That leaves us with 15 after round 2 elimination. Then you have 7 seeded players who have a free pass to round 3 that are added, bringing the total to 22, giving us 11 undefeated people in the end. Perhaps they will add additional rounds.


_{* I figure 5 people here, because the 7 seeded people for round 3 would come from this group already (so 12 total 6d+ amateur, not-already-qualified, AGA/CGA members who don't have other time commitments). At any rate, I wanted to use low side estimates for the whole thought exercise.}

Do you have a link? I find it a bit odd to do that since man-power will be lower that week, but it shouldn't require much for a 16 person tournament. It just means all games may not be recorded.



I agree that 2 is very strange. I just posted that link because it was the only source of info I could find. Also, your math assumes everyone in the running. I have been assuming the real preliminary will be limited to those with AGA greater than X.

I'm sure I've read more about this somewhere, but right now the only link I can find is Tygem's page - http://www.tygembaduk.com/enews/news.as ... =1&seq=165

That mentions the main event will be 7/28-8/4





That may be (and if they keep it at 3 rounds will likely be true). I was thinking the purpose of the prelim was to potentially allow anyone to qualify (as unlikely as it seems for most of us).

From a search on the AGA website:

These are players I don't have reason to believe are professionals or have left the US. Of course I'm not infallible about that.

Francis Meyer
Jie Li
Haifeng Liu *
Jing Yang
Yongfei Ge
Zhaonian (Michael) Chen
Jeffrey Wang *
Won Sik Lee *
Dae Hyuk Ko
Eric Lui
Zipei Feng *
Minshan Shou *

The * players are ones I know very little about. I didn't try and exclude people based on guesses about their interest. I also don't know how Canadian players will be handled.

A few players get a lot of attention, in part because they play so much, but it's really remarkable how many strong players there are out there.

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Occupy Babel!

yeah... there's no link (other than Mef's Tygem link).

and I'm rather ticked that the AGA won't post anything, and its been like pulling teeth to get any information at all.

some time back, I was asked to help, but given no information. I can't help with that.

Andy Liu and Gangsheng Shi became First AGA Profesionals.

http://www.tygembaduk.com/enews/news.as ... =1&seq=183

One American and one Canadian. Pretty damn cool. I wonder if I'll be able to catch them on Baduk TV.

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