AMERICAN GO E-JOURNAL

News from the American Go Association

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In This Edition:

• YOUR MOVE: Readers Write
• GAME COMMENTARY: Warm Stones
• GO NEWS: Go Deepest; Monthly Ratings Debut; Freedom In Go?
• WORLD GO: Korea
• GO CLUBS: Fort Wayne, IN
• The Go Player's Guide to Japan: The Genuine Article
• GO ONLINE: Good Looking
• GO CLASSIFIED
• AGA CONTACT LIST

CALENDAR OF EVENTS (U.S.)

February 22: Chicago, IL
"Axe Me No Questions"
Bob Barber 773-467-0423 komoku@earthlink.net

February 22: Toronto, Canada
Toronto Go Tournament
Monks@pmonks@look.ca 416-591-6414

March 1-2: Princeton, NJ
New Jersey Open
Rick Mott 609-466-1602 rickmott@alumni.princeton.edu

March 2: Sunnyvale, CA
7th Jujo Jiang Cup Youth Goe Tournament
Mingjiu Jiang 650-969-2857

March 13-16: Germantown, MD
Greater Washington Go Club's Yang Workshop
Anand Modak 301-513-8233 amodak@mcps.k12.md.us

March 22: Arlington, VA
Cherry Blossom
Allan Abramson 703-684-7676 mediate8@worldnet.att.net

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

YOUR MOVE: Readers Write

The latest (2001) edition of The Go Player's Almanac includes a comprehensive dictionary of Japanese and English go terms; order it from Kiseido at http://www.kiseido.com. As to your second question, that may depend on whether it's useful for you to know that a zekkoten is an ideal point to play.

GAME COMMENTARY: Warm Stones

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GO NEWS: Go Deepest, Monthly Ratings Debut!, Freedom In Go?

Go Deepest

"What's happening with chess is it's gradually losing its place as the par excellence intellectual activity," said Berliner, adding that smart people in search of a challenging board game might try a game called go. "Because the nature of the game makes it much harder for a computer to calculate its way to success," the Times reported, "no computer has come close to beating a human at go, and no human go player would dream of depending on a computer for advice - at least for the moment."

Check out the whole story at http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/nyregion/06CHES.html

Monthly Ratings Debut!

Newly updated ratings will be published monthly from now on, reports AGA Ratings Editor Paul Matthews. This major advance means that ratings will be updated twelve times annually instead of four as previously, enabling players to track their progress more accurately.

The latest ratings were published online February 1 and included the following tournaments: Zhu Jiu Jiang GOE Tournament, Open Section, CA, January 2003; Zhu Jiu Jiang GOE Tournament, Handicap Section, CA, January 2003; Seattle Go Center Ratings Tournament, WA, January 2003; Salem Winter Tournament, OR, January 2003; Feng Yun Go Tournament, Piscataway, NJ, January 2003; Feng Yun Youth Tournament (Older Children), Piscataway, NJ, January 2003; Feng Yun Youth Tournament (Younger Children), Piscataway, NJ, January 2003; MGA Winter Handicap Tournament, MA, January 2003; Fujitsu North American Qualifier, Baltimore, MD, January 2003; Seattle Go Center Mid-Winter Tournament, WA, January 2003. In addition, the following tournaments, which were received late, were also rated: Seattle Go Center Ratings Tournament, WA, July 2002; Seattle Go Center Anniversary Tournament, WA, September 2002; Seattle Go Center Ratings Tournament, WA, October 2002; Seattle Go Center Ratings Tournament, WA, November 2002; MidAtlantic Tournament, College Park, MD, November 2002; Seattle Go Center Ratings Tournament, WA, December 2002. NOTE: data from the Fujitsu Amateur tournament was not available when ratings were updated.

Freedom In Go?

Through an unlikely sequence of events, one the AGA's newest clubs will soon teach go to inmates at a maximum security prison.

The Syracuse Post Standard wrote a December feature story about the the first meeting of the Central New York Go Club in Syracuse, NY. Two weeks later, members received a letter from an inmate at the nearby the Auburn Correctional Facility asking for help learning the game. The inmate, who has been incarcerated for more than 20 years, said he had learned about go from a novel. He had also received a short lesson many years previously from a visitor after a Quaker meeting at the prison. In December, however, while on trash duty, he found the newspaper article about the club in a waste basket, and was delighted to see the game reappear once again. The club contacted the facility's supervisor of volunteer services, and after many phone calls and email exchanges, they had a plan in place. Each member who will participate must complete a volunteer application form and a routine background check. Once that is complete, participants hope put on an evening event in March in which they will demonstrate the game and give lessons to the inmates who have expressed an interest in attending. The club already has three members who plan to help.

In the meantime, the club has mailed a copy of "The Way to Go," and has asked the AGA to donate the inexpensive plastic go sets that are given to schools and clubs that teach go to beginners. The club may return for a second visit if there is enough interest. Club organizers are curious to know if there any other go programs in prisons. Contact the Central New York Go Club by sending email to Anton Ninno at aninno@cnyric.org. To learn more about the club, which just became an official AGA chapter in January, visit its new webpage at: http://community.syracuse.com/cc/cnygo
- Reported by Anton Ninno

WORLD GO: Korea

Meanwhile, Park Jieun 3P was defeated by Jujo Jiang 9P in the Brain Trophy Cup, a Korean tournament pitting twelve 9 dans against twelve 1, 2, and 3 dans. The 9 dan team won the tournament 7?5, but the narrow victory shows that the difference in pro ranks in Korea is no longer proportional to the strength difference among the players.
- William Cobb, Assistant Editor

SPECIAL OFFER FOR AGA MEMBERS! All the great go stuff at Yutopian is now 5% off for AGA members! Improve your game today and save money on go books, software and equipment at http://www.yutopian.com/
Just mention the E-Journal promotion and your AGA membership number when you order and the friendly folks at Yutopian will be happy to take care of you.

GO CLUBS: Fort Wayne, IN

THE GO PLAYER'S GUIDE TO JAPAN: The Genuine Article

It takes three hundred five years and a week to make a top-grade go board. Three hundred years for the kaya tree to grow, five years to season the wood and a week to make the board. The best kaya in the world comes from the Aya Forestry Reserve in Miyzaki Prefecture on the southern island of Kyushu, and during my trip to Japan last November I flew to Miyazaki for a day to visit one of the few remaining traditional go board makers.

Kenichi Kumasu's hands are large, powerful and gentle after a lifetime of working with the ancient wood known to scientists as Torreya crucifera, and to go afficianados as "honbamono", or "the genuine article". Although kaya grows elsewhere as well, Miyazaki's climate and soil contribute to a tree that yields a wood with unique blend of rich yellow color, good texture and pleasing resonance, as well as durability and a fine grain that retains its resin.

That unmistakably resinous fragrance permeated Kumasu-san's work-shop when I arrived on a damp November morning but cutting through the sweet, piney odor was an even stronger smell that was at once familiar and strangely overpowering. The mystery was solved when Kumasu-san explained that after the kaya is roughed out into blocks, the ends are painted with glue to prevent cracking while the wood is seasoned for up to five years. A kaya tree must be at least 300 years old to yield the fine grain that is so highly prized and after centuries of board-making and logging, there are very few of these old-growth trees left in the Reserve; so few that every remaining tree has been identified and tagged and cannot be harvested without official permission, which is why a traditional board-maker like Kumasu-san, who only works with honbamono, only turns out about 100 boards a year.

Kumasu-san's father started the business half a century ago and Kumasu-san has been making go boards the old-fashioned way for over thirty years. Leading the way to his wood-shop, he shows how the seasoned blocks of kaya are pared down to size on ancient table saws and then the surfaces hand-planed. Cheerful yellow curls of kaya thin as paper fall gently to the floor as Seiji Kuroki deftly draws the plane across the board; picking one up I inhale the bright piney scent. Kumasu-san slips his shoes off, sits cross-legged on the floor and with a few twists of his well-worn knife carves a goban leg into the flower shape known as kuriashi out of a water-softened chunk of kaya.

Each piece of wood, like the tagged trees, seems almost alive to these men. They discuss the color, grain, sound and even the wood's "flavor", assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each block. Their attention is more than purely aesthetic: even tiny flaws or variations in the number or direction of grain lines means a difference of thousands of dollars in the board's final price (see John Fairbairn's terrific article "A Survey of the Best in Go Equipment" in The Go Players Almanac 2001 for a comprehensive review of this and other fascinating aspects of go boards and stones).

Like everything else, Kumasu-san lays down the board's lines the old-fashioned way, with a sword that's been dipped in lacquer black as dried blood. After three hundred years of growth, five years of seasoning, and a week of shaping, and planing, the lines go down as fast as moves in the final seconds of byo yomi. The front of the small shop is lined with cases holding the exquisite end-products of all this time and labor. Eventually, Kumasu-san says, there will be no more old-growth kaya. When that day comes, he'll reluctantly switch over to katsura, but he's confident that he'll still be able to carve out a living refinishing boards made from the genuine article. "There's no end to this work," he says, quietly surveying the neat rows of table boards and gobans glowing warmly against the chill of the late fall afternoon. "I try to make each board my best."

GO ONLINE: Good Looking

Last time we were talking about downloadable files of books and articles on a wide range of go-related topics. If you clicked through some of those links, you may have discovered that go themes have appeared in Asian art for many centuries. Psst! Wanna see some really great stuff? Right this way:

http://www.kiseido.com/printss/ukiyoedx.html will take you to a huge online display of the Pinckard collection, probably the most comprehensive collection of Go-related art in the world today. The site is pretty self-explanatory. Read the text on the home page, then click any of the eleven links on the left to view dozens of beautiful and fantastic images like "Raiko Tormented by the Ground Spider," "Severed Head on a Go Board" and "The Courtesans of Hell". Clicking through each link takes you to a description of the significance of that particular collection. You will find links along the left to the actual images. Note: no matter which image you select, you will be taken to the first picture in that collection. For instance, there are ten "Portraits of Beautiful Women," but no matter which one you select you will find yourself looking at "Wakakusa at the Go Board," the first of these images. Just scroll down this page to view the other images. Unlike the text and diagrams you downloaded and printed out from the links in our last column, you can't really take these with you. The image files look great online, but you will be disappointed if you try to print them out. Many of these images have appeared as covers of Go World magazine (the site is maintained by Kiseido, which publishes Go World.)

Although you can't download and print this wonderful art, much of it is available -- for a price. Visit http://www.kiseido.com/printss/reproad1.htm to learn more about two dealers. If you want something truly wonderful on your wall, Gerstorfer is your man. he is not so much a dealer as an enthusiast who sells duplicates so he can buy more. He lived in Japan for years and collected everything he could find. At the Chicago Congress he had scores of authentic prints available, and some of the them were unbelievably fantastic! I'm still catching my breath from viewing an incredible print of "Apparition of the Spider Princess", priced at more than $1000 and a bargain at that. (If you want it, I'm afraid you're too late. I told my friend about it, and now I can visit it on his wall.) If you're working with more of a two-figure budget, Shotwell's digitally imaged prints are also very nice. I have "Scenes From the Noh Play 'Go' ", and no one yet has detected that it is a copy. Even if you're on a one-figure budget, you may be able to do very well. Every year, the Nihon Kiin publishes a calendar that includes six great prints on large (~11x17) high-quality paper. Unfortunately, for once I can't tell you where to find them online, but if you locate someone selling them, tell me, and I'll tell everyone. A smart businessman could scoop up the overstock every year, frame them and sell them off. Three of them hang over my couch, in cheap frames from K Mart, and they look like a million bucks.

And lastly: go art these days isn't what it once was, but China issued a series of stamps with a go theme in 1993. You can see the lot, about a dozen images, at http://www.goban.demon.co.uk/go/go_stamps.html. Some of these are available for a few bucks elsewhere on the Net (try "weiqi stamps'" in Google). So, there's something for every budget!

GO CLASSIFIED

WANTED: copy of First Kyu by Dr. Sung-Hwa Hong. d-barnes@pacbell.net.

FOR SALE: Sets of old "Go World" magazines: 1-48 and 1-15; 17-25; 50-56 and individual copies #22, #40, #43, and #51. Check them out at
john.hartman17@verizon.net
Or email dobe.doinat@verizon.net

WANTED: Go players in the West Lafayette, Indiana/Purdue area; e-mail Chris Kubica at ckubica@insightbb.com

Got Go stuff to sell, swap or want to buy? Do it here and reach more than 5,000 Go players worldwide every week at Go Classified! Send to us at journal@usgo.org

Ratings are on the web! Check the website; http://www.usgo.org for the full list.

GET YOUR TOURNAMENT RATED! Send your tournament data to ratings@usgo.org

AGA CONTACT LIST:

Published by the American Go Association
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Editor: Chris Garlock
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