AMERICAN GO E-JOURNAL: News from the American Go Association January 29, 2001 In This Edition: - CALENDAR OF EVENTS: Latest listings! - GO NEWS: Ascheim Public Go Lesson This Wednesday; Kerwin Workshop Set for May in Maryland - GO REVIEW: "Golden Opportunities," "Restless" - ONLINE GO: What We Talk About When We Talk About Ratings - GO CLUBS: University of Maryland - AGA OFFICER CONTACT LIST CALENDAR OF EVENTS (U.S.) February 4: New Orleans, LA Self-paired tournament (The Bayou Go Club's first tournament) 9AM at the Genghis Khan Restaurant. David Dinhofer; (504) 626-1138; ddinhofer@cs.com February 10/11: Charlotte, NC 2001 Carolinas Open Wayne Hansen (704) 536-4805 whanson319@aol.com February 17-18: Princeton, NJ 2001 New Jersey Open Rick Mott (609) 466-1602 rickmott@alumni.princeton.edu February 24: Sandy Spring Scholastic K-12 Chess and Go Tournament and Pizza Bash Sandy Spring, MD John Goon 301-315-8297 jgoon@erols.com March 24-25: Raleigh, NC Spring 2001 Go Tournament Joe Berry (919) 787-4358 gggc@nc.rr.com NOTE: this listing is not all-inclusive, featuring only upcoming tournaments in the next month or events which require early registration. For a complete U.S. listings, go to http://www.usgo.org/usa/tournaments.html For the European Go Calendar see http://www.win.tue.nl/cs/fm/engels/go/tourn.html GO NEWS Ascheim Public Go Lesson This Wednesday An Ascheim Public Go Lesson is scheduled for 2P this Wednesday, January 31 on the IGS. Ms. Guo Juan (5 dan pro, China) will play a handicap game against Mr.William Wandel (IGS "doubt" 5k*). William will play using the IGS student account = "publicgo". "William Wandel is a philosopher currently working in the European Go Centre, significantly contributing to the quest to spread the game of Go in Europe," reports Jan van der Steen. Kerwin Workshop Set for May in Maryland James Kerwin, Pro 1-Dan will hold a Weekend Workshop in Gaithersburg, MD, on May 4 – 6, beginning at 7 PM Friday night and concluding at 4 PM Sunday afternoon. The theme will be "Finding the Big Area in the Opening, Middle Game, and End Game." The fee is $135.00. A special rate of $69.00 per room per night (single or double occupancy) has been arranged at the motel. Attendance will be strictly limited to 16 players, and 9 people have already signed up. If you would like to attend, send a check for $135.00 to Gordon Fraser at 20505 Anndyke Way, Germantown, MD 20874. For more information, contact Bill Cobb at wmscobb@rcn.com GO REVIEW: "Golden Opportunities," "Restless" Book: "Golden Opportunities" by Rin Kaiho (Yutopian, 1996) Reviewed by Lon Atkins, 15K Life, like go, presents many opportunities for success, yet all too often our eyes fail to see the gold. In "Golden Opportunities," Rin Kaiho, 9 dan and raconteur, serves up a fascinating stew of go tactics and historical anecdotes. Rin doesn't lecture; he dramatizes in stories that provide a setting in which to envision go positions as theatre. The stories draw from both east and west. They aid the student's memory. A basic principle in each story foreshadows the correct go action. Aimed at the mid-kyu player in need of fresh perspective to advance but sure to be a joy for players of any strength, this book has great practical value. It mixes well with dry problem collections and joseki texts. It illustrates obvious moves that are really failed tries, develops the cognitive collisions that lead to enlightenment, and examines all the key variations. Get "Golden Opportunities" for fun and profit. Movie: "Restless" DIRECTED BY Jule Gilfillian Arrow Features; 98 minutes Reviewed by Roy Laird Leah is adrift, restless. Landing in Beijing after a string of flights from failed romances, she falls in with other expatriates. A chance encounter with a young weiqi master she saw on TV leads to . . . well, let's stop there and not spoil it. Let's just say that a few twists and subplots later, we learn what Dorothy . . . er, Leah is really looking for. (Hint: There's no place like it.) Along the way, we see weiqi on TV, on the street, in a club, at home. On TV, Master Sun (played by Asian Jimmy Smits clone Geng Li) teaches how to "attack from a distance." With an inevitability that Sidney Sheldon would love, the insight Leah gains enables her to turn the tables on the cad who jilted her, and jilt him right back. Catherine Kellner plays Leah with Sarah Jessica Parker-like insouciance. "Restless" is the first English-language film made in modern Beijing, and the first US-China cooperative filmmaking venture. Don't look for any scathing indictments here, just a basically lighthearted look at some young people falling in and out of love in China while trying to "find" themselves. Watch for a nice subplot about Leah's Asian-American friend, a hunky bimbo delivering his grandfather's ashes who gets more than he bargained for in return. It's a pleasure to see weiqi in an attractive setting, even without so much as a brief reference to the actual nature of the game. (An uninformed viewer could leave with the impression that weiqi is a "variation of chess," as The New York Times mistakenly reported.) Pi, the recent cult hit in which the monomaniacal main man discovers the secret of the universe on the go board, gave the game a lot of visibility, but didn't leave people wanting to learn more about it. Restless, on the other hand, is a film you can recommend to your friends on its merits, and after they see it they may well ask you some interesting questions about weiqi. If you're looking for a truly great film about weiqi, turn to The Go Masters, the first (and thus far only) joint venture between the Japanese and Chinese film industries. If you can find this out-of-print 1982 sprawling saga of World War II and the Japanese invasion of China, you are in for a once-in-a lifetime treat. Think of it as Go With the Wind. If you find a copy, let me know. ONLINE GO: What We Talk About When We Talk About Ratings by Terri Schurter Ratings are a fact of life in go. We encounter them online and off. On servers where they don't even exist, such as the Zone and Yahoo, we create them by comparing ourselves to others. Before addressing the specifics of online ratings in a future column I would like to raise some questions about what ratings mean to us. These questions stem from my own experience with ratings. Nearly five years ago I established an AGA rating of 19 kyu after my first tournament. This was weaker than predicted by my dan-level friends, so I was dissatisfied. I studied and stalled out at 16K for three years. I started to doubt that I would ever achieve my goal of "shodan before death". I adjusted my expectations, now believing that 9K would be a "respectable" rating. Then a strange thing happened. For personal reasons I stopped caring whether I won or lost, and began to simply play the game. I improved 3 stones – to 13K -- in a few short months. I still hadn't reached 9K yet somehow I felt that my rating had become very respectable indeed. Why? Now for the questions: What is a respectable rating? Does this differ from person to person, or is there a magic number that one must achieve to be satisfied? Does our level of satisfaction with our rating have more to do with the speed with which we are improving than with the rating itself? Does our opinion about what is respectable change when our improvement slows down or speeds up? Do we adjust our expectations based on what we believe is achievable? Are those who claim to be satisfied with ratings below 1 dan simply rationalizing? Why are some of us stronger on line and weaker in real life, while many of us are stronger in real life and weaker on line? Why do some feel dissatisfied straddling the line between 4d and 5d while others are grateful that they have finally dragged themselves across the line from 1k to 1d? Does the lust for improvement ever end? And if my feelings about ratings are complicated, then how much more complicated are the feelings of a more experienced player, especially one striving to achieve dan status after having stalled out at 3k or 2k for a number of years? Terri Schurter has been playing Go online since 1995. Her Go club, Wings Across Calm Waters [http://www.wingsgoclub.org], is a "virtual" chapter of the AGA. Wings meets week-nights on the Zone from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm Eastern Time, and on Wednesday nights at 8P on KGS. Terri plays under the name goddess_of_go. The views expressed in this column are not necessarily those of the American Go Association. GO CLUBS: University of Maryland UMD Starts Up Again The University of MD Go Club started up meetings again last week: Wednesday nights at 7:30P in room 1216 H. J. Patterson. Stephen M Mount smount@wam.umd.edu Easy Money Send us a 150-word review of a go book or go software and – upon acceptance -- we'll give you a $25 gift certificate to the go vendor of your choice. Tell us what you liked – or didn't like – and how it helped (or didn 't help) your game. Include the book's title, publisher, cost, your name and email address. Choose any book you like, from brand-new publications to old stand-bys that you keep going back to. GET LISTED & BOOST TURN-OUT! Got an upcoming event? Reach over 1,300 readers coast-to-coast every week! List your Go event/news In the E-Journal: email details to us at MAILTO:journal@usgo.org Ratings are on the web! Check the website (www.usgo.org) for the full list. GET YOUR TOURNAMENT RATED! Send your tournament data to MAILTO:ratings@usgo.org AGA OFFICER CONTACT LIST: President; Roy Laird: mailto:president@usgo.org Eastern VP; ChenDao Lin: mailto:vp-eastern@usgo.org Central VP; Jeff Shaevel: mailto:vp-central@usgo.org Western VP; Larry Gross: mailto:vp-western@usgo.org Treasurer; Ulo Tamm: mailto:treasurer@usgo.org Membership Secretary; John Goon: mailto:membership@usgo.org Chapters Coordinator; Bill Cobb: mailto:chapters@usgo.org Tournament Coordinator; Mike Bull: mailto:tournaments@usgo.org Education Coordinator; None Redmond: mailto:education@usgo.org Congress Liaison Officer; Chris Kirschner: mailto:cngrsliaison@usgo.org AGA website; Gordon Fraser and Chuck Robbins: mailto:webmaster@usgo.org American Go Foundation; Terry Benson: mailto: mailto:terrybenson@eudoramail.com AGA Librarian; Craig Hutchinson: mailto:archives@usgo.org Published by the American Go Association Material published in " AMERICAN GO E-JOURNAL" may be reproduced by any recipient: please credit the AGEJ as the source. To make name or address corrections – notify us at the email address below. Story suggestions, event announcements, Letters to the Editor and other material are welcome – subject to editing for clarity and space -- and should be directed to: Editor: Chris Garlock email: journal@usgo.org Voice: 202-289-7174 Fax: 202-371-0168