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Very curious me…

By Tyler Reynolds on July 13th, 2011

I really wanted to attend the Canadian Open in Calgary earlier this month; but, I just couldn’t swing it. :-(

Still, I’m very interested in everything that happened over the weekend, and what your opinions of the event were so that I can help to make next year’s event, in Gatineau, QC, [virtually in my back-yard] even more engaging! :-)

Please feel free to post your experiences here as comments, and send me any pictures you’re willing to share!

I should be hosting another tournament in early 2012 (barring any unforeseen apocalypse) with the Game Summit. Here I am at the 2010 event:

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This makes it all worthwhile…

By Tyler Reynolds on March 18th, 2011

A highschool club I recently helped to get new equipment. :-)

Yes, as Vice-president, and Chair of the Canadian Go Association’s (CGA) Grants Committee, I review and approve of most applications for funding and equipment submitted by teachers and students who seek equipment or support to promote GO to Youth in Canada… Email me (or Comment here) for more information about these initiatives, especially if you would like to get more equipment for a new or existing Go Club that welcomes and encourages youth in Canada!

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“How NOT to Play GO” by Yuan Zhou

By Tyler Reynolds on February 22nd, 2011

Author: Yuan Zhou

Cover of "How NOT to Play GO"

Publisher: Slate & Shell, Richmond, Virginia, USA.

Publication Date: 2009

Format: Trade-size saddle-stitched paperback, 32 pgs.

Price & Source: $10.00USD+shipping direct from the publisher

The succinct and relevant information for new or stalled Single-Digit-Kyu (SDK) players, aspiring to 1-Dan, packed into this volume is astounding! Although it principally deals with the mind-set required to excel, rather than tactics, the reader absolutely must fully digest the game diagrams to appreciate the sublime truths about the ubiquitous bad habits one must suppress in order to benefit most from this book.

Having read it first in an afternoon, I was struck by its simplicity. It reminded me a great deal of the works by my late Si-tai-gung, Ving-Tsun Grandmaster, Moy-Yat: thin and portable, but every page is golden with respect to the density of critical information! Even my students [who have read it and surpassed me] gushed about How Not to Play Go when it was time for prizes to be selected at the GO for All – Game Summit 2011 Open Tournament I hosted this past weekend. It is another book that should be re-read often until the principles presented are indelibly recorded into your brain. I will have to buy another copy for my collection, since I was obliged to award mine to the winner of the intermediate division. :-D

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Entries are capped @ 24 for the GO for All – Game Summit 2011

By Tyler Reynolds on January 30th, 2011

Pre-registration for the tournament just became more important! I’ve just been informed by the Game Summit administration that due to overwhelming popularity and Ottawa Fire Code, that participation in the GO tournament must be restricted to 24 participants! According to policy, online pre-registration is the ONLY way to guarantee your spot in the tournament! That is to say, that if 24 people sign-up online before the event, nobody else will be able to join unless there is a vacancy on the morning of the tournament… Only the positions in excess of the pre-registrations will be available on a first-come first-served basis once the event opens on Friday (18 February), so book now!

I have been assured that the PayPal payment (POS) system issues have been resolved; so, if you tried to register online for the tournament before, please try again.

If you have any questions, PLEASE call or email me: Tyler Reynolds ‘gotoguy’ _@_ ‘goforall.ca’. You can also follow me on Twitter @TheGOguy

This is going to be a great event!

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‘How to GO’ article updated on GO for All website

By Tyler Reynolds on January 11th, 2011

An animation of illegal Ko captures

I finally got around to adding the diagrams I’d made along with more detailed explanation of the mechanics of The Ko Rule in GO… I think the language could still use some more tweaking for readability, although I feel it is nonetheless accurate. I’ve since re-formatted the diagrams and the explanatory text… Check it out, and let me know what you think.

Canadian GO, National Capital Region, Ontario, Tournaments 1 comment

GO for All – Game Summit 2011!

By Tyler Reynolds on January 9th, 2011

GO for All - Game Summit Tournament in ProgressHello Go-fans!
If you’re anything like me, you’re already getting really excited about this year’s Game Summit event. Following on from our success from last summer, we are once again pulling out the stops to make the up-coming event even better than the last! We continue to be generously sponsored by Slate and Shell Publishing, and the right for first choice from among the array of their excellent books will be hotly contested to be sure. But this year, I’m also introducing a new competition that will be open and accessible to everyone, not just dyed-in-the-wool and aspiring strategists: GO-Art! As always, I will have lots of boards and stones on-hand for people to play and learn on, all weekend; but, I will also have a limited quantity of deeply discounted good-quality equipment and Canadian Go Association memberships on sale. :-)

This year, I do need some GO-playing volunteers to help me pull this all off, since the extravaganza is now just too much for one guy to manage alone. Please, express your interest in lending a hand (in exchange for free admission to the event on the days you’re helping out) either by leaving Comments here or (more reliably) sending me an email here As Soon As Possible.

The GO Tournament: Sunday 20 February, 2011 @ the Nepean Sportsplex, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

We will be running a 3-round Swiss-MacMahon event, paired within 8-player divisions. Each match will be played using Japanese Rules for scoring, and each player will be allotted 30-minutes basic time, plus 5 periods of 30-second byo-yomi (overtime) per game.

Pre-registration is heartily encouraged (and just makes good fiscal sense), since it will save you money if you sign-up before the doors open on Friday—25% off if you commit to play before January 19th! Registration will be available on-site, beginning on Friday, 18 February, but it will cost more (manual data-entry and such)…

Game-Day Schedule
09:00-09:30 Registration
09:30-10:00 Pairing
10:00 Sharp: Round 1 begins
12:00-13:00 Lunch
13:00 Sharp: Round 2 begins
15:00 Sharp: Round 3 begins
17:00 Scoring, Tie-breaker Lightning Games (ONLY if necessary), Prize selection and Awards Ceremony

The GO-Art Exhibition:

Aesthetic forms naturally develop in a game of GO.

'Black-fish drowns the White-water' This is an example of aesthetic forms that naturally develop in a game of GO (from a Dan-level tournament game played at Game Summit 2010).

Everyone loves to play with GO-stones; and, everyone has felt (perhaps secretly) compelled to make pictures with them on a goban at one time or another… Now, it’s openly encouraged! Participants will be permitted to arrange black and white pieces in any way they choose atop a standard 19×19-line Go board, and then for one-coupon, a picture will be taken of the resulting artwork, and displayed for the remainder of the weekend. Every Game Summit attendee will be entitled to cast a vote for their favourite composition, and Go Tournament players will be able to vote separately for the [GO] Player’s Choice Award. People who might not otherwise have stopped to check out the world’s most engaging board-game will be tempted to learn more about it after they’ve felt what it’s like to place the pieces!


Newsflash! 19:40 Friday, 28 January, 2011

Phil Waldron, 6-Dan, has submitted his regrets that he will be unable to defend his title, won at Game Summit 2010, as he will not be in attendance; so, the Championship is wide-open!

Hanxi Zhang, 6-Dan, has volunteered to be on-hand to give tips and encourage new players over the course of the weekend.

Musings, National Capital Region 2 comments

YES, I would be happy to join your GO study group!

By Tyler Reynolds on December 11th, 2010

Last week, my wife told me I’d received a message on my voice-mail, from some of the local Embassy Cup competitors, asking if I’d be interested in joining their group to play GO here in the city! Unfortunately, as I was replaying the message I inadvertantly depressed a button on the key-pad, and the message was lost before I could copy down the number :-C I have been plagued with digital mishaps, lately, and I’m beginning to wonder if my parents-in-law have infected me with their “internet-gremlins” O.O I hope whoever it was will call me back! I seemed to remember, from what little of the message that I actually heard, that the caller mentioned having been a Chess-professional; so, I did a reverse-lookup on Daryl Bertrand, and left a message with someone who claimed to be his brother-in-law, asking him to call me for a game.

Even if it wasn’t Mr. Bertrand who called, if you’re a GO player in the National Capital Region, I’d be happy to drop-in wherever you’re playing with your friends—just give me a call! :-D

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“Oops, I did it again…” :-(

By Tyler Reynolds on November 25th, 2010


LATE BREAKING NEWS:
Tyler “TheGOguy” Reynolds
has once again inadvertantly
rendered himself offline . . .

“It’s a funny story, really,” begins the frustrated founder of GO for All, “everyone in my family has a Nintendo DS, except me; and, I had heard that there was a decent GO-playing game-cartridge for the NDS, but, that it was only released in Japanese… Naturally, I wanted to see what it was like, so I located a ROM version of it on the internet, and proceeded to attempt to install the requisite NDS-emulator program on my Linux-workstation… There was a MS-Windows build available; but, one has to compile and install the Linux distribution manually, which required installing a C-compiler with all the pre-requisite code-libraries—and this is where the story takes a sad turn—I had installed software like this before, but never under this particular flavour of Linux (I’d always done it from the command-line) but I thought I’d try the GUI interface… Installing the compiler and its components was easy; but, the emulator software wouldn’t build; so, in my frustration, I proceeded to purge it and the C-compiler from my system, thoughtlessly, without making a /root back-up first (or earlier I might add), and in my haste I must have tripped up in resolving the dependencies… This morning, I boot up to let my daughter visit her favourite web-site, and find that not only is my browser absent, but my computer is completely off-the-network: all networking capability was gone! After a string of stifled expletives, I apologised to my daughter, and explained that she would have to use Mommy’s computer
[like I am now].”

So, until further notice, the most reliable means of contacting Mr. Reynolds will by by telephone, since Mrs. Reynolds, and their daughters, use her computer fairly often.

Musings, National Capital Region, Tournaments 3 comments

GO events at the next Game Summit 2011 (February 18-20)

By Tyler Reynolds on November 24th, 2010

Phil Waldron, 6-Dan, gives an impromptu lesson between tournament games at Game Summit 2010

For those of you who are not already familiar with the game of GO:

If GO wasn’t both fun and engaging, people would have stopped playing it thousands of years ago! GO is the ancient and deceptively simple game that challenges young and old equally to compose a pragmatic strategy for victory in every match. Played on a grid of 19 by 19 lines, the object of the game is to occupy and surround more points on the board than one’s opponent. Each player alternates placing a single stone of their colour on a vacant point each turn; however, if one’s pieces are completely enclosed by the other colour, they may be removed from the board… Since the pieces cannot be repositioned during the game, the degree of commitment involved in each play, and the emergence of contingencies after every move, reveal the unfathomable depth of consideration that may be required to succeed. But take heart! Intuition and creativity are, as much, if not more, valuable than hard analysis in this elegant game of perfect information! It is for this reason that computers still cannot compete equally with humans, and that programming a competent GO player has recently become the ultimate goal of Artificial Intelligence development in the field of Computer Science. Take 5 minutes to learn the rules of the game, and you may be blissfully drawn toward mastering it for the rest of your life… Visit http://www.goforall.ca/home.html

Help me make this year’s GO activities the most memorable Game Summit has ever seen! :-)

For those of you who would like to play in the tournament:

  • Would you like your results to contribute to or set your national rating?
  • Would you like 3 or more guaranteed games in the tournament?
  • Would you like to have the tournament games all in one day or spread out over the weekend?
  • Would you like to have qualified coaching in advance of the event?
  • Besides cash prizes, would you rather have prizes of GO books, instruction/memberships, or equipment?

If you love GO, but aren’t interested in competing this year:

  • Are you willing to help promote GO by talking to and/or teaching the uninitiated about the game during the weekend?
  • Would you like to attend a seminar presented by a highly-rated or professional player?
  • Would you be interested in entering an artistic contest (B&W Goban art) for prizes?


Tell me your thoughts, and let’s discuss them!

Tyler Reynolds
Vice-president – Grants & Youth, Canadian Go Association http://www.go-canada.org
Founder, GO for All http://goforall.ca/news
Mentor, American Go Foundation http://www.usgo.org/agf

Originally Posted in the Game Summit Forum

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[Japanese] Embassy Cup 2010 event report

By Tyler Reynolds on November 20th, 2010

Photo by Al Robinson Photography

Tournament Director, Charles Chang, and Second Secretary & Cultural Attache, Noriaki Sadamoto, frame this year's Division Champions

Every year in recent memory, the Ottawa Chinese Go Club and the Embassy of Japan in Canada have collaborated to put on a free Go tournament that has drawn a strong field of competitors from throughout Ontario and neighbouring regions. This year once again validated Canadians’ love of the national game of Japan at this annual rallying point of our domestic Go scene!On-site confirmation of pre-registration was smooth and the lunch program (with 6 different meal selections!) was both cost-effective ($10 with a drink) and efficient (since there are few restaurants capable of providing timely sustenance nearby). This year repeated last year’s move to a 3-round format of games with 1-hour Absolute (sudden-death) time per player.

There were a lot of familiar faces at the tables, and many new ones as well. I conceeded to play in the “F” (Beginner) group to round out the numbers on the condition that I would not be awarded any prize, and proceeded to play challenging Teaching games with my opponents—who all impressed me! Of those, 7-year-old David Xu, 18-kyu, showed great fighting spirit and commitment to the game despite being under-compensated; and, I have every expectation that he will become a very strong player in the near future with the guidance of his father (who won Division “A”).

I was also pleased to welcome a pair of my students from Montreal (whom I helped open a Go club in their high-school 2 years ago) to their first Embassy Cup.

A friendly game on Table 1.

They have both since graduated into CEGEPs, one of which has a pre-existing Go club. Andrew Olders, 2-kyu, demonstrated his transcendence of my skill by taking 3rd place in the “D” group.

The Awards were as follows:

Embassy Cup 2010 Prize Winners

The Prize Winners

OPEN DIVISION (5-Dan to 6-Dan)
Champion: Remi Campagnie, 6-Dan
Runner-up: Han-Xi Zhang, 6-Dan

“A” DIVISION (3-Dan to 4-Dan)
1st Place: Kevin Xu, 4-Dan
2nd Place: Qing Chan, 4-Dan

“B” DIVISION (2-Dan to 3-Dan)
1st Place: Timothy Mott, 2-Dan
2nd Place: Fang-Yi Luo, 3-Dan

“C” DIVISION (1-kyu to 1-Dan)
1st Place: Rene Binette, 1-Dan
2nd Place: Vincent Bilandson, 1-kyu

“D” DIVISION (6-kyu to 1-kyu)
1st Place: Francois Porzio, 1-kyu
2nd Place: Anna Blinder, 2-kyu

Yuhang Cui, 5-Dan, (2008 Embassy Cup Champion) gives an ad hoc Teaching game to Mark Deraps between rounds.

“E” DIVISION (10-kyu to 7-kyu)
1st Place: Daryl Bertrand, 8-kyu
2nd Place: Martin Gravel, 8-kyu

“F” DIVISION (20-kyu to 10-kyu)
1st Place: Philippe Leroux, 17-kyu
2nd Place: Vanessa Robitaille, 10-kyu

[If I have mis-transcribed any of your names, I appologise; but, please also email me so that I may correct any error as soon as possible.]

I look forward to attending this event again next year, and making the impending February tournament at the Game Summit 2011 event as much of a success.