From November 10 to 12, a novel tournament was played in Osaka, Japan, called the Kansai Go Open Knockout Tournament. It is sponsored by the Japan Chess Academy and sponsored by The Hankyu Electric Railway Corporation, and was founded specifically for chess players in the Kansai region due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their income. The tournament is divided into five groups according to the ranking of chess players, with Yuta Iyama Kudan, Sada Takashi 7 dan, Abe Ryoki 3 dan, Takuya Okawa Andei Okawa, and Naoji Yada winning the top group, group A, group B, group C and D respectively.
Yuta Iyama beat Daisuke Murakawa in the final of the top group to win the cup smoothly.
The purpose of this tournament is to "relieve and support the scourge of the new crown pneumonia", affected by the epidemic, the official competition in the Japanese Go world has been stopped for two months, and the players have no income without matching, which is even worse for the Kansai chess academy players whose professional allowance is much lower than that of the Japanese chess academy. There are a large number of professional chess players in Japan, most of them are popular chess players who make a living by teaching and guiding chess, and the most tragic blow of the new crown pneumonia epidemic is the elderly, the closed environment, and the local Go clubs in close contact. In order to give the majority of professional chess players the opportunity to increase their income, the Kansai Go Open Knockout Tournament has become a symbol of self-help in the Japanese Go community.
Chess players from the Kansai region gather together.
The tournament is divided into five groups, the top group of eight people to participate, for the Kansai Chess Academy and the Japanese Chess Academy Kansai Headquarters in the previous year's prize money ranking of the top four professional chess players, the champion and runner-up prize money of 1 million, 400,000 yen (about 63,000 yuan, 25,000 yuan). Yuta Iyama, Normitaka Yamada, Daisuke Murakawa, Yu Masaki and other famous generals are in this group.
Group A is for 5 to 20 members of the Kansai Chess Academy and 5 to 12 winners of the Kansai Headquarters, with a prize money of 700,000 and 300,000 yen (about 45,000 yuan and 19,000 yuan). This group includes Nakae-nobuya, naka-eun seol's father, Shunya Imamura, Satoshi Yuki, and Tetsuya Kiyonai, who are well-known in the Kansai Chess Academy.
Group B is 21st to 36th from the Kansai Chess Academy and 13th to 20th from the Kansai Headquarters, with a prize of 600,000 and 250,000 yen (about 38,000 yuan and 16,000 yuan). Veterans of the Kansai region, such as Toshihya Goto, Shigeaki Yokota, and Chen Jiarui, are in this group.
The tournament is an open match, attracting many Kansai Go fans to watch the game.
Group C is for the top amateur chess players from the Kansai Chess Academy, 21 to 40 from the Kansai Headquarters, and 500,000 to 200,000 yen (about 31,000 yuan and 13,000 yuan) for the championship prize money. In this group there are Zhongyi and her sister-in-law Tatsumi.
Group D consists of 53 professional chess players and 10 students after the Kansai Chess Academy, 41 professional chess players and 4 students after the Kansai Headquarters, female amateur chess players and amateur 8-dan chess players living in the Kansai region, and the championship prize money is 400,000 and 200,000 yen (about 25,000 yuan and 13,000 yuan). The women of the Kansai Chess Academy, Including Mika Yoshida and Kazuko Konishi, were placed in this group. The last four groups are all eight players through the qualifiers, and then three rounds of the tournament to determine the winner.
The long-lost large-scale interpretation venue.
Although the prize sharing of the championship and runner-up is not high, there are many players involved in the game, the amount of game fees is large, and the total scale of the game is not small. At a time when professional chess players in China, Japan and South Korea are seriously lacking in competition income, it is the warmth of the Go world that has been missing for a long time.
The qualifiers were held between September and October, and the most high-profile Nakagawa Nakae-ichi won consecutive victories over Yamada Zhibao 7-dan and Ugaya Shunta-2-dan in the first dan, but her father and sister-in-law both lost out. Surprisingly, group D, professional chess players were in the qualifiers, only about the Nishiki Academy Yada Naoji Kudan one-man qualified, alone against the seven amateur opponents in this tournament.
Born in 1973, Yada was promoted to Kudan in 2000, his first title in his thirty-two-year career.
This tournament basically formed a confrontation situation between the Kansai Chess Academy and the Kansai Headquarters of the Japanese Chess Academy, which is the first time in the history of the Kansai Chess Academy in the past 70 years since its establishment. Also in Osaka, the overall strength of the Kansai Chess Academy is significantly stronger, but the Kansai Headquarters has Yuta Iyama, the all-Japan Go overlord. Even though each round of confrontation is a large number of people in the Kansai Chess Academy, Yuta Iyama still wins the three Kansai Chess Academy majors in the top group, Wu Baiyi, Yu Zhengqi and Daisuke Murakawa, and wins another championship without suspense, and is about to embark on a new journey in the Chinese Wei B League.
Zhongyi's performance did not live up to people's expectations of her.
The other four groups of champions and runners-up were all won by the Kansai Chess Academy, and it is worth mentioning that Yada Kudan in Group D finally defended his professional honor against three amateur players. The much-watched Nakai children in the first round of the Lick Kansai Chess Academy "Hoshikawa Three Brothers" hoshikawa Hangyang four dan, the semi-final loss to the same group champion Takuya Okawa, also let people see her momentary growth.