Eight top US AGA go players will gather in Los Angeles next week to determine the next US professional. Play in the 4th AGA Pro Qualification starts on Sunday, January 3 and ends on January 9. The games will be broadcast live on KGS from the Hotel Normandie by the E-Journal; morning rounds will begin at 9:30 AM and afternoon rounds will begin at 4:30 3:00PM. The players are Eric Lui 7d, Ben Lockhart 7d, Aaron Ye 7d, Jeremy Chiu 6d, Sarah Yu 6d, Andrew Lu 7d, Daniel Gourdeau 6d and Manuel Velasco 5d. The tournament will be played in two parts, a Round Robin Prelim Sunday through Wednesday, followed by the Championship Thursday and Friday. Myungwan Kim 9P is the tournment referee, Jeff Shaevel is the Tournament Director, AGA President Andy Okun will be on hand and Chris Garlock and Dennis Wheeler will head up the EJ recording team, which will also broadcast game commentaries on the AGA’s YouTube stream.

https://www.youtube.com/user/USGOWeb (or http://www.twitch.tv/usgoweb)
[Edit: Streaming may not start until later in the week due to technical difficulties.]

Round 1 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=J ... 3A30am+PST
Round 2 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=J ... 3A00pm+PST

Edit: It's not just US players. Round 2 will start a 3pm.

Results posted here: http://www.usgo.org/aga-professional-results-2015

Update on streaming:

due to some trouble with the venue's internet connection (spotty hotel wifi), they won't be streaming the preliminary rounds. We will be getting short analyses of the games post-facto, and there will be broadcasts on KGS, but there won't be a livestream until probably tuesday...

(i'm not there for the broadcast, i have to work :'( )

I have to wonder about this. If "Eight top US players" includes a 5d then isn't the field a bit too weak? He probably has little chance of winning but it seems that perhaps there is not enough strength in depth to talk about a strong group of US pros.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

Daniel Gourdeau? Daniel Negreanu?

Close enough. I'll root for him.

US and Canadian

Canadian players are: Sarah Yu 6d, Daniel Gourdeau 6d and Manuel Velasco 5d


The players opted to move the evening games start time up to 3 PM

Probably the players have to want to be pros in some specific way requiring future work like teaching or going to distant venues for training or tournaments. Some stronger players might not be interested in that aspect of it, have demanding jobs or career prospects they don't want to give up, or something like that. Remember Jie Li?

I think Manuel Velasco just came back from a 5 month training trip at the BIBA in Korea. He might have improve a lot during the last few months, but it is not shown in his AGA rank.

Also, there are probably several very strong players who could not commit to spend an entire week in Los Angeles to play go. Also they have to be Canadian or US citizens to participate. Permanent residents or strong international students can't participate.

Sadly, I know of no such expectations for American pros.

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- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

Gansheng and Andy both have traveled overseas in tournaments and have done some commentaries, and I recently saw some commentaries by Calvin. I think that increasing the expectations of the new professionals and probably also doing more to publicize what they're doing would help.

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Occupy Babel!

Is there a place I can find the 1st round results?

we're still working on that actually, since the website's been under a DDoS attack most of the weekend.

For now this could do:

http://www.gokgs.com/gameArchives.jsp?user=usgo1
http://www.gokgs.com/gameArchives.jsp?user=usgo2
http://www.gokgs.com/gameArchives.jsp?user=usgo3
http://www.gokgs.com/gameArchives.jsp?user=usgo4

Looks like the AGA site is back, see the results here:
http://www.usgo.org/aga-professional-results-2015

So far only round 1 has been updated, I assume round 2 will get added soon.

Yes, I see from the news that the attack on Linode DCs went on for some time. It's sad that this sort of thing is becoming more frequent and increasing in scale. (For those who don't follow network security, this type of attack is not on usgo.org or any site in particular, but rather targets the infrastructure of a large provider which hosts services in many geographical locations. It's not as if there are any organized sworn enemies of the AGA, or if there are, they are not behind this. See: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/04 ... s_of_hell/).

I voted for Manuel Velasco only for his name... the first spanish name in a tournament of pro qualification

Darsey does not sound very Spanish.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

but he's from Canada and speaks French

Yes... but "Manuel" is a spanish name, don't try quit me the hope

If I be serious, I think that Eric Lui will the next AGA pro.

The first round (i got the kifus from OGS):

Eric Lui (black) defeats Manuel Velasco (white)



Daniel Gourdeau (white) defeats Jeremy Chiu (black)



Sarah Yu (black) defeats Andrew Lu (white)



Ben Lockhart (black) defeats Aaron Ye (white). Black wins for 1'5.



The next round, play Eric Lui against Sarah Yu and Daniel Gourdeau against Ben Lockhart

Sarah and Ben were losing 0-1 in the BO3 because of the results of the round robin against their opponents. They are now 1-1 and they will play against versus this morning against Andrew and Aaron for qualification. Aaron and Andrew still have a chance.
Daniel and Eric won versus their opponents in the round robin and won in the first knock-out round, so they are both qualified for semi-final.