Warsaw go tournament

On Thursday I went by train to Tesin to meet the Pocsai family with Ondrej Silt. They were two and half hours late due to some complications with finding the right way but we managed to reach Warsaw (and find our accomodation) before midnight. On Friday we’ve done some sightseeing (primarily the Old town) and were the first to come to the playing place.

In the first round I played with Radek and lost by a few points after not really punishing his deep invasion. Second round with Roman Pszonka was a difficult game since I let him make a lot of influence all over the board. However, I managed to reduce rather succesfully and made a super strong group in the middle, then one overplay by him and he had to resign. Third round with Ondrej Silt, I made a good start and captured a few of his stones, but then he made some pretty good invasions and my “influence” turned into a weak group and I got toasted. Fourth round was nasty, I got Wojciech Wieczorek and the game went terribly wrong. He cut my good shape and it worked for him, I almost died. The rest of the game was under his control, and despite me getting a few points here and there I was still 10 points short. I could have let him lose on time though, because his time run out, but I thought it would be unfair because the ing clocks weren’t talking at all (maybe I should have let him lose though, he didn’t show much appreciation for me allowing him to continue (but maybe that’s just my feeling)). Fifth round with Fisz (aka Kamil Chwedyna), he made a lot of influence, I made two dead groups. There was a lot of fighting… to make the long story short, part of his “influence” died in the end. Sixth round with Leszek Soldan started with a fight, which I managed quite well in the beginning but collapsed later when I let him attack me too much.

The tournament was very nicely organized except of one thing – pairing. The pairing was done as bad as possible: in the first round, two strongest players played with each other (which is a very serious mistake) and Tibor Pocsai played with Rita Pocsai (that would be easy to avoid, at least in the first round). Some people were paired up several times (and never down), someone said it was according to sos but I don’t really believe that. ;-) And the last round’s pairing was the worst possible for me (although that was only bad luck, no bad pairing), like the only one that enabled me to fall down to 9th place… which I did, by the way.

BIG thanks to vertigo for the chinese fan he brought me and for organizing the great tournament, to Krzystof Giedrojc for giving me the book “graj jak shodan” (“play like a shodan”) to improve my Polish (juz to jest lepsze? :blush:), to Venca Kijonka for letting me stay at his home when I couldn’t get back home, to Tibor Pocsai for driving me safely, to mama Pocsai for taking care about me as if I was her son, to Ondrej Silt and Rita Pocsai for being such a perfect couple (and to Ondrej for helping me to arrange everything and enlightening me with stories (not only) from Japan), to kotasia and all the others who persuaded me to go to Polish Summer Go School.