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rec.games.go, misc.legal, alt.gossip.celebrities, misc.writing,
soc.culture.china



 Big Yank Money for the Oldest Game From a Dirty Source via the
Jesuits?





MY KINDA TURFF* TOURNAMENT (* aka _BADUK_, _WEI CHI_ OR _GO_).



By Hal Womack 3-dan



hal.womack@gmail.com

http://www.myspace.com/halwomack



Ima kind of grouchy this morning 'cause as of yesterday afternoon the
powers that be somewhere upstream between City Hall, the White House
or Tel Aviv have again cut off my on-line access. As a resident in a
housing project, I have depended for many moons on a free wireless
system run by San Francisco's Department of Technology. Usually it
works, albeit in a manner far inferior to DSL. I have just left voice-
mail for the guy what finally fixed the problem last time around,
which was about a month back. Fortunately a) I can still compose on
WordPad and maybe later this morning I will be able to use my thumb
drive to post this article from a remote venue. So as to meet my self-
imposed goal of getting up the message before our big "3J" tournament
opens tomorrow morning at the Chinatown/Financial District Hilton, I
will have to write the whole thing out of my own haid, as it were, w/o
any further on-line research or fact-checking. And b) I have a wee bit
of material already stashed away in Alpha below to help sail me
through the first of the four parts of this modest proposal for the
celebration of our game.



Part the First:



APM [see Glossary] 4 years ago in Alpha, our first measure will be to
restore the natural drama of a tournament by reverting to the "sudden
death" rule aka "single elimination" or "knock-out". This ancient,
logical & transparent method builds tension successively throughout
each stage of the competition and yields an indisputably worthy
champion.



The present "Swiss-MacMahon System" OTOH can and sometimes does award
the first prize to a player who has been defeated by another
competitor with the same win/loss record. For tie-breaking SMS
routinely resorts to such measures as "Sum of Opponents' Scores" and
even "Sum of Defeated Opponents' Scores". If Aphrodite be a knock-out,
SMS be the proverbial lipsticked pig. 'Tis something like choosing
whether to use a majority of the popular vote or the Electoral
College.



Using single-elimination, a 5-round tournament such as our present one
reduces an opening field of 32. Under this low limit we would,
therefore, have successive bands of 32, starting with the Open
Division, then the Dans, then the Kyu's usw. For future purposes, the
reader will note that a 7-round tournament, such as the San Francisco
Go Club used to run in our glory days in the old J-town temple under
Shinji Dote, successfully squeezes out a field of 128.



Please see Alpha for the details.



Part the Second:



The Jesuit-run University of San Francisco should adopt the San
Francisco Go Club. The SFGC has been rather an orphan ever since June
of 1995 when the murderously corrupt, C.I.A.-linked Mayor Frank Jordan
criminally abused his 3 Stooges Fire Department instantly to expell us
w/o warning from our grand old temple at Bush (!) & Laguna Streets
which we had then occupied for 62 years. The drab rat Jordan was
evidently motivated by an article which I had posted a few days
earlier from my own private account urging the students at S.F. State
University to present Hillary with a hangman's noose dedicated to her
hubby for his war crimes against Iraq. Hillary had been invited to
give the Commencement Address there. At the time I was the treasurer,
the teacher of beginners and the resident night watchman for the Club,
so Jordan's dirty coup deprived me of both my home and my office,
besides gravely wounding one of the City’s most important
institutions. Only six weeks previously HenKi's _Sayeret Matkal_ had
blown up the Federal kindergarten in Oklahoma City, thus magically
reviving both Clinton's presidency and the C.I.A. Billary was on a
roll that Spring. In his novel LET US PREY! (available in paperback),
published the previous Fall, the Yali commando Bill Branon had already
predicted this sequence. Rather similar to the artistic predictions of
the WTC Stunt by the brilliant film LONG KISS GOODNIGHT [1996] and by
John Grisham in his novel THE BRETHREN [2000]. Fortunately again, the
voters dumped Jordan in the next election in favor of Willie Brown,
for whom I energetically campaigned on the Usenet.



The two main reasons I myself first came here in the pre-Internet age
of 1978 were the then world-famous Club and also MUNI, which meant
that one could live more-or-less comfortably without maintaining a
private automobile. After hitch-hiking my way up from from San Diego,
with a tournament stop-over in Los Angeles, I was met at the door of
the Club by master Shinji Dote and that was the first place I sat down
in this town. But back to biz...

 [snip]