Life In 19x19

Six games (with mixed results) played this week by Ilya Shikshin, Eric Lui and Andrei Kravets during two different events. The game records come from the Kansai ki-in website. Since the game informations (players, colours and event) were not readable, I added them in the sgf using KifuDepot.

And the second event, games played on the 31st against 1p's.

EGF report: https://eurogofed.org/index.html?id=171

Uberdude wrote:EGF report: https://eurogofed.org/index.html?id=171

Ah, my bad. I find the EGF website utterly bewildering because I never find what I'm looking for, therefore I rarely check it. Would have been a good idea to do it this time...

Shenoute wrote:I find the EGF website utterly bewildering because I never find what I'm looking for, therefore I rarely check it.

Still? It used to be a rarely updated ugly pile of rubbish from the 1990s, but in the last year or two it's been revamped and actually gets decent news from Viktor Lin et al.

Well, maybe my comment was too harsh...But apart from the news, I find the way it is organized hard to navigate when you're looking for something that is not in the News section. Most of the main sections (Academy, EYGTC, Grand Prix, Pair Go) are irrelevant to me while informations about the Europeans pros and their commented games (if there are any) are buried somewhere without any direct access.

I'm not sure that bewildered is the right word, but what exactly would you like to see added to the site?

A simple search box?
An sgf database that you can access from the Media Tab?
In blogs we often see a list of tags/categories we can click on to look at only those posts - would you be wanting something like that?

The games above are from a match between European/US pros and Japanese new stars, sponsored by Igo Kansai, and from the preliminaries of the Sankei Pro-am.

The Chinese are also making efforts to provide games for western pros, e.g. the Silk Road Cup.

So far, though, the western pros are not making a lot of headway - winning a few games but also losing to amateurs.

Not quite sure if he counts as a western pro but Francis Meyer has likewise had an occasional good result in e.g. the Kansai Ki-in League.

Western pro appearances in Korea seem to have dried up recently (the kimchi?).

Javaness2 wrote:I'm not sure that bewildered is the right word, but what exactly would you like to see added to the site?

A simple search box?
An sgf database that you can access from the Media Tab?
In blogs we often see a list of tags/categories we can click on to look at only those posts - would you be wanting something like that?

Yes, I would see these as improvements (although I must admit it wouldn't occur to me to look for sgf in the Media tab, a "Games" tab seems justified enough for a Go federation). In general, I'd like more actual go content. I'm not really interested in the naked results of each tournament everywhere in Europe while I'd be very pleased to have an easy access to the latest (commented?) games of Europe's strongest players. The News section has some of them but it is not practical if you want to browse through game records. In the same vein, there doesn't seem to be any mention anywhere on the site of the fact that the European pros are doing some teaching. Maybe they aren't, maybe it was not possible to advertise it on the website because that would have angered established, non-pro teachers, I don't know. But being able to schedule a teaching game or to send a game for commentary to one of the European pros and pay for it via the EGF website would be a nice addition.

But in the end, I know how much time it takes to make things happen (believe it or not, I have spent, and somehow still do, a lot of time on the ground to help spread go) so I don't complain and demand that the EGF change anything. I was just explaining why its website is not a page I visit on a regular basis.

Edit. On a related note, there is also the fact that some interesting material (book reviews, interviews,...) appears in the News section, only to be buried away after a couple of months. Why not have more sections on the front page? Do we really need to have separate tabs for "Academy" and "EYGTC" or could these two be put together under "Youth" leaving more space for another tab, "Pros", "People", "Books" or whatever?