Huawei weiqi club

Girlwing got a job at Huawei. Most of the people at the company are Chinese and as you know most Chinese know what weiqi is. Because Girlwing is quite a strong player the rumour soon started to spread and a strong weiqi player at the company wanted to play.

So Girlwing and I brought a weiqi set and went to her work yesterday evening. There we met some of her co workers who were working late, all of them Chinese. Soon we went in to the "Baltic" conference room where we were supposed to play. First the Huawei guy played against me. We sat down and I took black and we started to play...

We just played a few moves in the opening when the first people came in to the small conference room. We said hello to each others and they looked at the board while we played a couple of moves and soon they walked out again. A couple of moves later the next person showed up to see the game for a while... and like this it continued for the whole game. Some come in more often than others and it was obvious that they understand something about the game.

The game started quite good for me with a lot of potential territory while my opponent didn't have so much. But soon he started to invade and get aggressive and it got obvious that he is much stronger than me. In the end of the middle game I had to resign after he had destroyed most of my potential territory while he had enclosed most of the center.

Then it was Girlwings turn to play. The game looked very even for quite some time but somewhere in the middle he made some too aggressive overplays and Girlwing took the initiative and managed to capture a group of stones in what first looked like his big side territory. After that his position got weaker and more stones got lost in other parts of the board and in the end a big dragon got cut of and died and the game was over.

I couldn't help thinking about all those people who came and watched our games and what potential there is in getting more weiqi players to the Stockholm club and to Swedish tournaments. The problem is that Chinese players are very shy and and not confident about their skills unless they are among the very best ones. So they are not very willing to play in tournaments because they think tournaments are just for strong players. It is kind of the same with playing in a weiqi club. They feel that they are not strong enough. So when we explain that here in Sweden we play just for fun and everybody play in tournaments, even the weakest beginners, they seem to have problems in believing us.

Maybe we will go there again now and then playing weiqi. Maybe we can start the Huawei weiqi club in Stockholm.