Life In 19x19

The Samsung Cup from this year is to abolish lunch breaks even during games where the time limits are 3 hours each. I gather there will be no eating at the board - a tough day for a player who likes to skip breakfast.

This is to avoid collusion. That seems to imply there has been suspicion of some collusion in the past. Certainly there have been cases of pros cheating but proven examples of collusion don't seem to have shown up yet. Given the highly likely increased incidence of the rumbly-tum tesuji, the cure may prove worse than the disease, although it may discourage possibly colluding spectators from getting too close.

And that brings up the notion that presumably supervised toilet breaks can't be far behind.

What are they afraid of exactly? The playing pro getting advice from a stronger pro?

Will players have the opportunity to eat lunch away from the board, with their clock running? Personally, I'd gladly sacrifice 15 minutes from my 3 hours to have a quick bite to eat.

Play a difficult to answer tesuji, then quickly go to the lunch room, and you might even have lunch entirely on your opponents clock.

Why not simply prescribe a joint lunch of both players with the referee?

Then, all you further need is a separate, debugged bathroom.

John Fairbairn wrote:The Samsung Cup from this year is to abolish lunch breaks even during games where the time limits are 3 hours each. I gather there will be no eating at the board - a tough day for a player who likes to skip breakfast.

Certainly the etiquette of greasy hands touching the go stones is poor. However, in photos of Japanese matches I have often seen trays of food set out on the floor near the players.

I wonder what the actual practice is?

Harleqin wrote:Why not simply prescribe a joint lunch of both players with the referee?

Then, all you further need is a separate, debugged bathroom.

I like this. Lee sedol is so frail. I am afraid that he won't be able to take 6 hours straight.

Li Kao wrote:What are they afraid of exactly? The playing pro getting advice from a stronger pro?

They're afraid that two eyes might be better than one. In the most famous accusation of collusion, the thought was that a pupil provided his teacher with the move: http://senseis.xmp.net/?Shusai.

Harleqin wrote:Why not simply prescribe a joint lunch of both players with the referee?

Then, all you further need is a separate, debugged bathroom.

Hard to imagine they didn't think of this, but it's also hard to imagine what objection there would be.

Clearly, they worry that the pros will be consulting bots on their breaks.

I am a bit confused by the word "collusion". In my vocabulary, it denotes a situation where two players, who are meant to compete, instead conspire to determine the result outside of the game. This is a constant threat to poker games between strangers, by the way. In Go, one could say that the players in the Oteai who conspired to draw in order to get their promotion points had colluded.

In this case, however, it seems to me that the fear is not of collusion, but of illegal conferring with external sources.

As a point of comparison, professional chess games often go over 6 hours and have no breaks. (Which is not to say that that's how it should be.)