First Day of EGC

The first post of this blog is late by one day, and misses an introduction. The reasons shall be explained in unforeseeable future.

I arrived at Tampere yesterday. It was quite easy to find the tournament site as it seems that everything cool (including our accomodation) in this city is located on the road connecting the railway station and the school(s) where the tournament takes place. Besides Go, people also play football, frisbee, various weird card games, Mafia (btw the Mafia always wins)...
I've also met many of my friends, some nice people and some pretty people as well as some nice and pretty people.
By the time I am writing this on paper, the first round has already finished. Approximately half of the participants won their game the other half probably lost theirs. I belong to the latter, unfortunately. I lost to a female Korean 7d who is called Kang Samm Fing (I don't remember her name... I hope she won't read this :D), on board 3. The playing rooms are spread in three buildings, with the boards 1-100 located in a school, about 5 minutes walking distance from the registration venue (yes I walk very slowly). As for this venue, the lower the board number, the more stairs one has to climb so that the top boards literally are on the top.
In my game I have once again proved my psychological weakness in tournament games. Rather than a weakness, although not a strenght either, I could call it a special ability.
My opponent Kang was female, as mentioned. A lot of people think she is hot, so as she probably does too, I was able to use reverse psychology, making her think that I think she was hot and that I would get distracted. She also played very fast, I heard she always does.
After the fuseki, as was expected, I was behind. This time it was because I made a big unintended sacrifice. This is when my ability comes into play. When I am behind, I start finding good moves, and my opponent actually started using her time. I managed to punish her overplays and eventually she died unintentionally as well, quite bigly too. Eventually I was ahead (Jussi told me later by 15 points). Now that I am ahead, my ability causes a brainfreeze. Suddenly a semeai happened between my stones and my stones (ones that I supposedly captured). When I came to my senses, there was a huge seki on the board laughing straight at my face. This is the story of how Kang Samm Fing, 7d, won her first round in the main tournament of the Zhuyeqing Tea European Go Congress Tampere 2010.





























By the way, for some sophisticated reasons Japanese rules with 6.5 komi are applied in the tournnament.
The news of the day for me is that breakfast, 3p, lost his game by 0.5 points to Cornel, 6d. According to the oracle, breakfast will win his next game by 0.5.

random facts: Today Namii will treat me a beer^_^
I finally hugged Prodi, accomplishing a mission that was assigned to me 2 years ago.
A*** sucks [smiley, flower, flower] (By *a**a)