2021 Canadian Open: The Second Weekend

I came into the second weekend of the Canadian Open with a record of 2:2. Last year 4:2 was enough for me to win first place in the 9k-8k division. This year the division is 9k-6k because there are not as many people playing near my rank. Things are sparse at my level this year, and I am near the bottom of my division at 8 kyu.

I still had hopes of winning my last two games of the Open and getting 2nd or 3rd place as a result. My dream came true, but it was not easy.

Saturday:

My first opponent of the day on Saturday was a 10 kyu who had gone undefeated the previous weekend. He was 4:0, which was daunting. I came to discover after our game was over that he had played the first round with my Pair Go partner and beaten him rather decisively. I went on to defeat him and give him his only loss in the tournament. He went on to achieve a record of 5:1 and came in first place in his own division which was one division below mine.

Here is that game:

Round 5

My 5th Round opponent turned out to be the only opponent I had who was not a Canadian League player. I won this game by managing to live after my opponent tried to contain a shoulder hit. It was really scary, but I survived and went on to take over a huge lower right corner by killing seven black stones in the p3 area.

My 6th Round opponent turned out to be a Canadian League player in the league above my own. It was unlikely that I would be able to win that game, but I did so handily by a 25.5 margin.

Here is that game:

Round 6

I am guilty of making a few overly cautious moves at the end of this game. I did count and knew I was winning big time. I know that s4 was unnecessary. I even read it properly and trusted it. I played it anyway. My bad? Maybe so. I think I won this game by destroying the center.

I had a good day on Saturday and went to bed with visions of prizes dancing in my head.

Sunday:

The final day of the Canadian Open was devoted to Pair Go and Blitz. I signed up for Pair Go with another Clossius go student. He is one stone weaker than I in the Canadian system, so we made an excellent Pair Go team because neither one of us had to worry about whether our partner would understand our moves based on strength alone. We also have a similar knowledge base because we are both familiar with the Clossi Approach taught by our teacher Shawn Ray. To learn more about our teacher search for Clossius or Shawn Ray on Patreon or on YouTube. He has many instructional videos and operates a Discord server called The Online Go Club with active discussions.

There were actually very few Pair Go teams, probably because of the lack of available female players. There were a number of male players who signed up alone who were unable to be paired. The combined strengths of the teams were quite wide, so handicaps were common in the games.

My partner and I managed to play two out of three of the scheduled games. Our opponents never showed up for the 2nd game, so even though my partner had a misunderstanding about timing and had arrived late, we could not have played anyway. We ended up taking large handicaps in both of our games and we won them both. When we were confronted with something we did not understand we simply tried to Clossi it. I believe we were successful in that.

Here are our Pair Go games with active links:

Pair Go Round 1

We won Round 1 by resignation. The last move in the game was a net I played to protect the black stones to the right which were cut from the other black stones.

We did not play Round 2. If we had, we would have had to give four stones, and would likely have lost.

Pair Go Round 3

We had to play Round 3 all the way to the end. Our opponents confused us with their opening where they repeatedly did tenuki. We did not understand it, but we Clossi Approached it. At least I hope we did. In any case we won by 21.5.

Late in the evening on Sunday we got email announcing the winners of the Divisions. I came in at 3rd place as I expected.

I managed to win a two month Basic Membership to Awesome Baduk. I proactively signed up for a free month wile waiting for my code. I also signed up for their Discord server. I have already watched one of their videos which is about Cross Cuts.

Thanks to everyone who worked so hard to bring us this terrific online event this year. I had a great time. If it is held in real life in Canada next year I will be unable to attend. I do hope that they decide to hold some online events in the future. I am signed up for the next Canadian League.

Although there were a few technical glitches early in the event that required some players to issue challenges, things ran very smoothly later in the tournament. It was a real pleasure to have games begin automatically for the tournament on OGS and to have results automatically recorded by Baduk Club.