Life In 19x19

It's not always clear how the preliminaries for the seven major Japanese titles work.
For example, while it's not difficult to ascertain how the B and A preliminaries for the Meijin works,
it's hard to deduct the details of exactly how the C-preliminaries are organised.

http://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/match/meijin/040.html

If anyone could shed a little light on any of the titles, just drop a note!

ps: Is it possible for Go4Go to implement preliminary (from round one) score charts? It would be the only English-Language one, but it would be a lot of work to do by hand.

Kin's site might be helpful
http://igokisen.web.fc2.com/news.html

Looks to me just like some players are seeded into A, B, and C based on previous performance, and the preliminary tournament to decide who moves up to the round robin league is just played in order from C to B to A to the "Final tournament" to get the three new players.

I noticed that this year in LG cup there were 8 amateur players in the preliminary torunament.

How do they get in the preliminary? They win some other minor tournaments and get called or?

The major Japanese tournaments are open to all professional players. Most tournaments have preliminary C, B and A. A few bigger tournaments have an additional 'final preliminary'. These are followed by the main tournaments. Players are seeded into these preliminaries based on their past performance. Stronger players are often seeded into later stages directly.

Note that this year, a complete new arrangement is introduced in the Kisei tournament.

Go4Go's score charts collection cover all the main tournaments. It is not too difficult to add a few more every year to cover the final preliminaries. An example is this:

http://www.go4go.net/go/tournaments/news/50/60

It is indeed a lot of work to cover earlier stages.