On 25th in the morning, there was an opening ceremony. We were all told to wear Thai U-Go official shirts, nice shirts indeed.
The ceremony started with some speeches by important people. All were in Thai. Even if it were in English, I doubt I would listen to it. I was too nervous as I was really not used to tournament. Alex and Jimmy looked much calmer.
The ceremony was really formal. Towards the end, there were oath session by the officials, perhaps to swear their dedication towards serving the tournament. Flags were raised, representing each participating countries and perhaps some universities. Finally, at the end, there were Thai traditional dance performance.
Alongside with Asian tournament was Thai University tournament, participated only by Thai universities with special participation from two Singaporean polytechnic teams. Here, I could see how large go community in Thailand was. Hehe, Malaysia probably only got about 40 players with only 20 active ones.
I was told by My Phung, Vietnamese team leader that there were about 300 players in Vietnam. I now appreciate the urgency to promote Weiqi or Go in Malaysia fast !
The picture above shows me playing Lin-Shih Wei, a 6d from Chinese Taipei who had played Go for 15 years. I thought I had reasonable chance in the beginning, securing some points from attacking. However my attack ceased after his weak group escaped to the middle, leaving me with no strategy.
Afterwards, during the game review, he told me that I should have kept him weak. I took mental note of that.
“Keep your opponent weak” !
That was probably the biggest thing that I learned from the tournament. If your opponent’s stones are weak, we can attack and control the game. The mantra is so obvious, I knew it before but couldn’t apply it to overall strategy. Ah well, try again next time.
