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May 13th, 2005

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At Stb club last night…

Reinhardt took on the visiting Chinese 1-dan, Michael Wang, on 4 stones and won comfortably. Unfortunately, our cameraman (Rory!) was involved in a tournament game at the time, so we don’t have any details on the game.

The second round of the handicap tournament also drew to a close, with Steve and Flo winning their games against Daniel and Rory respectively (both games were won by White with 1 handicap). The draw for Round 3 is now available.

In addition, although no games were played in the Western Cape Meijin tournament, Riaan Swart forfeited his game to Reinhardt Messerschmidt, and Dale withdrew from the tournament. This means there is only one match still uncompleted in Preliminary Round 1 – in Pool 4. Read here for more details on the later Preliminary Round qualifiers.

Posted by Steve in News, Tournaments

4 Comments »

This entry was posted on Friday, May 13th, 2005 at 10:22 am and is filed under News, Tournaments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

4 Responses to “At Stb club last night…”

  1. Hugo says:

    I found it quite odd, when I said I was 20kyu, he found it really odd, and thought me a complete beginner, claiming that they start at 18kyu or something like that. Maybe just a language/communication problem (though that is hard to believe, the conversation was relatively clear), since Sensei’s Library says no such thing.

    May 14th, 2005 at 7:15 pm
  2. Rory says:

    The word kyu is a japanese word and thus means nothing to them , yes sure they have a rating system but whe must find out what the word is they use 🙂

    May 15th, 2005 at 10:48 pm
  3. Steve says:

    I’m pretty sure they also use the word kyu for their amateur levels. The levels aren’t directly comparable with Japanese ranks though – a Chinese 14 kyu, for example is somewhat stronger than a Japanese 14-kyu. However, to the best of my knowledge, ranking systems around the world are organised by the people in the area, and different areas have different opinions on the best way to do it. For example, in South Africa, we start players at 30k, while other countries start their rankings at 35k, 25k or even 20k. To make it worse, some clubs only start ranking their players at a different level to the national organisation. Different countries usually allow clubs to assign ranks as they wish up to a certain level, but for any rank above that level to be official, it must be awarded by the national organisation.

    I suspect that that may be the case in China, or perhaps even only Beijing, or the district in Beijing Michael comes from, or perhaps even only his club. The lowest “official” ranking one can get is 18kyu, but to be a Chinese 25kyu, you just need to be able to take 7 stones against a 18kyu and play a fair game.

    Of course, in a country with so many strong players, it is certainly reasonable for them to consider a player at 20 kyu to be a beginner. In fact, at around 18kyu, players are generally able to reliably know whether they have two eyes, spot snapbacks before they happen, are familiar with basic unsettled shapes, know how to make eyes false, and have a decent chance of spotting an attack on a group before it becomes too late. Granted, they’re not as good at these things as a stronger player, but they’re aware of them, at least. In that sense, 18kyu is a reasonable stage to consider that players know enough about the game to no longer be considered beginners.

    May 16th, 2005 at 9:44 am
  4. Hugo says:

    Consider then his suggestion that I give Lei Feng nine stones? Hehe. I do believe I heard that right.

    May 16th, 2005 at 5:00 pm

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