US Go Congress - Second Post

Well, I finally got around to writing up my post congress report. All in all I was swept away with Go during one magical week in Portland. I didn't too terribly well in the US Open (2 out of 6) but I did play in a couple of simultaneous games against a professional player (Xuefen Lin and Seung-Chul Park) and won one! I saw MoGo beat a professional too (Kim Myungwan) - sign of things to come?! For me it wasn't so much the Go playing but rather the experience that I will treasure.

There was a one interesting evening, full of Go variants.

This first one here is "Go without boundaries" or something like that. Basically they kept going until they reached the edge of the table. Perhaps they pulled up another table after that. I didn't watch this one 'til the end - it could have lasted a long long time!!



Next was blind Go. They played with cotton reels with little bits sticking out of them so the players could 'feel' the 'stones'.



Next was some kind of nine sided Go:



Interesting. Check out the position. It's a Ko! Look at the board after the next move:



Next up was 3-d Go:



Then 23x23 Go:



Four-colour Go:



This one looks awesome, Poker Go. There's some information about this on Sensei's Wiki





Finally, something I think was called blitzkrieg Go or something like that. It consisted of four players who had their backs to the 'real' board where a fifth player would make moves that the others played. The four outside players would have to guess where to play:





To finish off, here's a picture of Takemiya Masaki, giving a lecture and talking about one of the first games where he started to play his Cosmic style of Go:




You can see black has pretty much given up the four corners and has a massive territory in the middle.