Compare some results

There are 3 famous tournaments for amateurs. World Amateur Go Championship (WAGC), European Go Championship (EGC) and US Open. Which tournament is the hardest one? I thought a lot about this question and decided to compare the results of the players, who took part in few of these tournaments:

Cristian Pop (Romania) was 4th in WAGC-2007, but got 8th place in EGC-2007
Ondrej Silt (Czechia) was 9th in WAGC-2007, but got 11th place in EGC-2007
Andrey Kulkov (Russia) was 10th in WAGC-2007, but got only 28th place in EGC-2007
Francesco Marigo (Iltaly) was 21st in WAGC-2007, but got 29th place in EGC-2007

Ge Yongfei from Canada who is now leading the US open, after defeating Jiang Mingjiu, 7-dan pro, got only 10th place in WAGC-2006

Another example: Cornel Burzo (Romania) got the 7th place in US Open-2005, but he was only 12th in EGC-2007.

Now the subject is pretty clear.

Today we will talk about the results of EGC-2007 in Villach. You may check them here: http://goverband.at/egc2007/results/main_wall.htm

Ilya Shikshin, 6-dan from Russia is a new European Champion! We both scored 7 points from 10, our SOS was exactly the same, but he was 2 points ahead on SODOS. I beat him at the 8th round, but he was lucky with the pairing. Ilya improved a lot since the EGC-2006 in Italy (he was only 16th that time).

It seems that it's necessary to change the rules of the European Championship. This time Ilya lost to the 2nd prizewinner and did not played with the 3rd one (Cristian Pop, 7-dan).

Last year in Italy Svetlana Shikshina became a champion without playing with #2 and 3 (Dinerchtein and Kulkov). She won the tournament, because of her good results against Koreans. Cristian Pop, 7-dan was far from the winners list in EGC-2005 without losing a single game to European players. He lost all of his 4 games to Koreans! If you like to win the European championship next year, you must study Korean Go!

There are several proposals for next European Championships. They were shortly discussed during the EGF members meeting in Austria. I thought about these ideas and think that the proposal from Sweden is the most suitable one. "In order to make the competition for the title more distinct, let the first eight rounds of the EGC proceed as usual. Then let the leading four European nationals after eight rounds
play knock out for the title. The new rule can be implemented for the first time in the EGC 2008".

Everything sounds fair and it will be still interesting for strong Asian players to visit future EGCs. If we make a separate tournament for top Europeans, the open championship will be too dull for Asians, according that they are 3-4 stones stronger than regular European 4-dan players.

Alexander Dinerchtein