Example Project: Tour-tournament

• New Way to Organise a Knock-out Tournament
• New Way to Stimulate Go at a Club-level
• New Way to Integrate Clubs
• New Way to Integrate Players of the Highest level with players of lower levels
• New Way to Train Live-Commentators
• New Way to Bring a National Event really to the Country
• New Way to Get Go in the Picture of the (local) Press

The Dutch Go Association has organised a new knock-out tournament with sixteen of the strongest dutch players. Each game was played at different clubevenings of dutch goclubs, live-commented for interested public by one of the other participants of the tournament. In this way the tournament took the form of a tour through the whole country.

The Tour aims to bring Go of a high level as close as possible to the lokal clubs. It makes a national event really spread around over the whole country.

The main goal of this tour is to utilize the attractivity of strong Go play for small Go populations. With a commented game on a high level the clubmembers can learn something. Around the event an open evening can be organised, to show the game to a general public. It also attracts active players of other clubs, so that intermediate contacts will be strenghtened.

(In the Netherlands there are about thirty clubs. Most of them are small and gather about six people once in a week to play Go. The larger clubs, for instance Amsterdam and Leiden, have evenings with about sixteen players. The members play normal competition, once in a while a lightning tournament and sometimes they organize a special activity such as a study-session with a strong guest-teacher or a tournament with funny variations of Go. Only the stronger clubs organise once in a year their own larger weekend-tournament and host many players from other clubs. Those weekend tournaments are the only meeting places for players of different clubs.)

The Tour-tournament gives the smaller clubs an extra oppportunity to meet new people of other clubs and to get the attention of possible newcomers. The central organisation makes it possible for even the smallest clubs to host such an event. The anouncements were made and spread around by the secretary of the Dutch Go Association. Because the game is part of a larger, somewhat serious tournament, it is also easier to get the attention of the local press.

The participants in the tournament had sometimes to travel a little bit more than normal. The weaker player got always the advantage of the nearest place (as local favorite), if possible. All were very entusiastic about the lively atmoshere. Each game was a central event and thus they found their play as really important to the public. The players were also commentators to the games of other participants. They got explicitly the task to make the game clear to a general public, so that even absolute beginners could enjoy at least a part of the commentary. In this way some of them got their first chance to comment a game for a general public. They highly appreciated this chance to get some experience with this manner of spreading and stimulate Go.

After the end of the game, in most cases, the two players and the commentator analyse the game together in front of the public. This brings differences in the perspectives on Go to the light and much of the time this makes the commentary in retrospective somewhat funny or to the contrary more to the point.

(The tournament has come to an end, in the final Frank Janssen 6d lost to Guo Juan 7d. Other participants were: Renée Fehé 3d, Stijn van Dongen 4d, Merlijn Kuin 4d, Caspar Nijhuis 4d, Ruurd Wiersma 4d, Emil Nijhuis 5d, Willem-Koen Pomstra 5d, Erik Puyt 5d, Robert Rehm 5d, Filip Vanderstappen 5d, Rudi Verhagen 5d, Gilles van Eeden 6d, Geert Groenen 6d en Gerald Westhoff 6d. Visited clubs were: Almere, Amstelveen, Amsterdam, Apeldoorn, Eindhoven, Enschede, Groningen, Hilversum, Leiden, Nijmegen, Rotterdam, Tilburg, Utrecht.)

This idea was developed and implemented for the Dutch Go Association by William Wandel, staff-member of the European Go Centre. And thus this contribution is out of the competition for the Award.

European Go Cultural Centre Schokland 14 1181 HV Amsterdam

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