European Go Tournaments and Rating

As I discussion today about rank differences between countries it made me think of a problem I had before.

The discussion about rank differences between countries comes now and then and in the end of the discussion most people agree the solution is that people need to travel around and play in tournaments against players from other countries.

Yes that would be perfect, in theory. Not so many can afford to do that. But if you are really interested in go and are prepared to spend money and time to travel to other countries to play in tournaments then you can do it.

So I started thinking about it. I can combine a vacation with a tournamenet. Pick out nice cities in the world, look up what tournaments they have and book the tickets. Maybe take one or two days vacation from work to get some extra time for sightseeing. If I make some friends there then I can maybe save some hotel money and sleep on a couch for free and later return the favor when that person visits my city for a tournament.

Then came the next problem, how do I find a list of all the tournaments? First I looked at eurogofed and there I found a link to EuropeanGoTournamentCalendar and http://www.eurogofed.org/eurocup/calendar.htm and http://www.eurogofed.org/calendar/calendar.htm. It is quite obvious that there are a lot more tournaments played than this. So how do I find the rest?  I asked online at lifein19x19.com.

Soon I got a lot of links. So many that someone created a new wiki-page at Sensei's Library called NationalTournamentCalenders. Great stuff! So many places to look at. It would be great to have some central place for all this information. Like a web page where you can search and sort by date or country and city. Such a web page would be easy to create but hard to maintain. How would we get all organizers to use such a tool? And if they use it would the players find it useful? Would it encourage players to go to tournaments in other countries? Maybe, maybe not. It might be worth a try, but this page should probably be hosted by EGF. They should see an interest in such a project.

Another thing to try to solve the rank difference problem in Europe could be to arrange online Internet tournaments that get reported to the European rating database (EGD). With such tournaments we have the problem of cheating. You can let some strong player do the playing for you. Yes there is a risk for that and I don't have a clever idea how to prevent it. The best way is probably to avoid any prizes and only let the players compete for the fun and honor. I have been thinking of creating such a tournament myself and if I am allowed to report the results to EGD I might even go through with it.

Suji

After three years of vacation, the downloadable PDF go magazine Suji is back with its fourth issue.

Now they aim at an international audience instead of just players from Switzerland. This is probably a smart move because it will be easier to get people to contribute with material and the magazine will get more readers.

It is a well designed magazine consisting of totally 19 pages including the covers. There are plenty of images and colors on most pages. I believe this magazine can have a nice future and I look forward to the next issue in the end of March. I expect the following issues to have more pages but I would be happy even with less. I think it is more important to keep a steady release cycle than to have a perfect magazine and many pages.

In this issue we can find:

• Editors note
• iPhone/iPad commercial (no mention of alternative platforms like webOS or Android)
• Game review
• Go theory lecture, Solid openings
• Go problems
• A cry for help
• Letters from the readers

I hope they find the inspiration to keep creating many more new issues in the future.

IgoLocal

A new tool for weiqi players has emerged. It is called IgoLocal. This one can be seen in two different ways, and they work perfectly for both.

One is as a reaction against too much focus on online Interenet go servers and the lack of real life social interactions over a physical go board. The other is to see it as a very useful tool for beginners to find other players and go clubs in the area where they live. If a beginner have no one to play against then they will soon loose interest in the game. And why not use this tool to find go players or go clubs in other countries when you are out traveling? I'd like that!

This new site is aiming at working as a real life physical go server. You register on the site and point out on the map the approximate location of your home. It is not important to point out exactly where you live as long as it is in the correct city area. Then you can see on the map if there are any other go players that live near you and send messages to those players. You can join a go club and discuss topics in an online forum.

You can set up games for people to join or accept some others games. After joining a game you are supposed to physically meet in some nice location like a park or a local pub and have a nice time over the go board. This is a good idea, both to get new friends and to expose the game of go to the public and in that way hopefully attract more players to have all the fun we already have.

IgoLocal have a nice looking and easy to use interface. If you are curious then you can read more about it here. There will be more features in time but it is impressive as it is already.

In the first day after release the site had 150 people registering and now as of this writing, three days later, I can count to 398 players and new players register all the time. We are now 6742 active players on the EGF ranking list and there are probably the same for USA. If we count all the casual players that are not going to tournaments we probably have to triple those numbers. I do not dare to guess the huge amount of Asian players. Let's hope a lot of us knowing something about the game of go to register and we will have a very powerful tool to use.

So spread the word to your go playing friends to register and you will see that you might get some new friends in your area  to play and socialize with.

Wbaduk Online Go Tournament

Wbaduk is following up their free pro lessons with holding a new online tournament with prices.

If Wbaduk keeps promoting go and their new international servers, this might become an interesting regular tournament. We will see if they can give some much needed competition to KGS dominant position in the west.

I will look this up and see if I have the time to play.

Blog Statistics

I read somewhere that IE8 now is the most common web browser on the Internet. I got surprised by that news so I decided to check the statistics for my blog.

I could not find any support at all for the claim from IE8 to be the most common browser. Rather the opposite.

Ok, my small blog is no good benchmark for this but I got around 200 visitors each month so that gives something to go on.

About the visitors to my blog we can see that Firefox is the most popular browser. Good second place is IExploder. How common is version 8 among those? About 6% of all IExploders are of version 8. 52% is version 7 and 43% is still version 6.

Another interesting thing we can read from the graph is that Google Chrome is slowly gaining interest. It will maybe pass IExploder within a year among my readers. No? You don't think so? Hmm... we'll see...

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Released

Finally we have a new version 3.5 of the Mozilla Firefox web browser. As usual there are several new and improved features. The most talked about is the new "private browsing" porn mode. Other nice features are improvements to tabs, speed and the awesome "awesome bar".

There were three days ago that this Mozilla Firefox 3.5 arrived and the Mozilla Foundation have this cool live download statistics. As of this writing there are almost nine millions downloads. Quite impressive! :)

If you are new to Mozilla Firefox you can start with some nice Tips & Tricks. After that you should really take a look at all the nice
add-ons that exist for Firefox.

The first add-ons that I added was:

• AdBlock Plus
  
• Tiny Menu
• Googlepedia
• ColorfulTabs
• AutoPager
  

Have fun with your safe and fast Firefox web browser!

The White House 2.0

The government of U.S.A. with Barack H. Obama is doing an impressive effort of modernizing the spreading of information. In the official blog from the white house they write about their new channels of information using Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube and iTunes.

I think Sweden might be a bit behind here. There are probably many but I only know about one blog being written by a politician and that is one that left office for several years ago. That might say something about the Swedish politicians ability to reach the Swedish people... or maybe it say more about my interest in Swedish politics.

Create a social network on Ning.com

Do you want to create your own Facebook.com? Or maybe your own XiaoNei.com? Maybe you want to make it more specialized to a certain area? You don't care that much about all your current friends but instead want to focus on your special areas of interest and maybe make some new friends?

That is where Ning.com has found their idea. Let people create their own Social Networks on the Internet. I just heard about it today and it sounds really good compared to Facebook that is getting more and more boring for every day. When will the hype die out? Probably when someone figured out something better and neither Facebook or Myspace will be fast enough to catch up. Maybe that is what we are seeing now? Maybe Ning.com will be able to activate us again and keep the interest alive and permanent? We'll see...

Anyway... I just registered and created a new Social network called The world of WeiQi. The reason that I created it is that there were no social network that was general enough. There only existed one for a weiqi club in America. I thought about creating one for Sweden or Stockholm but I feared that was too small, so what a heck here is a network for the whole world!

Next I need to find a social network for Sci-Fi, Star Trek, Star Wars, Programming, Linux and all other stuff I find interesting. There already exist a lot of specialized networks and if you miss one, you can always create one on just a couple of simple steps.