Sweden vs. Finland, that classical ice hockey match, was lately played on a quite different turf; the go board. I get the feeling that Sweden won the match, but I have not been able to corroborate it. The go media still seems obscure to me. However, yesterday evening I followed this exciting go game between two of the strongest Nordic players Antti Törmänen and Fredrik Blomback (part of the above mentioned match). So, there we are again. I’m trying to make sense of a go game played between two players much stronger than myself. Feel free to either laugh or enjoy:

So, Fredrik Blomback won. I have earlier recommended Antti Törmänen’s excellent homepage “Go of Ten” and now he has posted a very interesting thesis, “Building a Human Master”, dealing with “how expertice is developed” in chess and go. Ought to be interesting stuff.

The Meijin-sen match between Iyama Yuta and Yamashita Keigo is under it’s way. If you compare the English speaking go world with the English speaking chess world, I am astounded by how little news there is to be found on the great Go matches from China, Japan and South Korea. If these matches were between chess players, then you would be able to find comments on them in a number of places. The best news service I have found is gogameguru. Also, if you are interested in learning a bit more about go, I recommend you to type “Bat’s + lectures” on YouTube and you will find a lot of commented games by this entertaining Bat character. Also, I recommend a blog by Antti Törmänen. This guy is a very strong go player (6 Dan) and comments (mostly) on his own games.

The first game of the Meijin-sen was played last week and (as usual) I am not sure that I have understood anything. Still, I have made an effort to comment on the game. Beware though; I am not a strong go-player. My current raking on IGS is +1Kyu.

As the match proceeds you will be able to find the games here.

The 68:th Honinbo Match (sponsored by the news paper Mainichi Shimbun) between Takao Shinji and Iyama Yuta is already becoming quite mesmerizing. These guys are two of the most interesting players in the Go world and their second game involved a lot of exciting ko fights that made me want to do the “wave”, all by myself. I am still a 1kyu player on the Go servers, so my comments should not be taken too seriously although I hope that Go players up to 2 kyu can get something out of it. For the interested Chess player I recommend to open the “Sensei’s Library” page on Go terms in a separate window, in order to understand more of the vocabulary.

Today’s game was played between two rather strong players on the IGS Panda server a while back. I was deeply fascinated with the huge ko fight that arose in the middle of the board. I hope you will enjoy it too.