Having been the scene of the first game of the current Kisei Final, Taipei enjoyed the spectacle of the final of the 7th Ricoh Pair Go Championship on 14 January 2001.
Kusunoki Teruko 7-dan and Yoda Norimoto 9-dan overcame Osawa Narumi 2-dan and Rin Kaiho 9-dan. Click here for the game.
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Older News From 13 December 2000: KANSAI AT LAST LOSES OUT IN RICOH PAIRS
Kusunoki Teruko and Yoda Norimoto will play Osawa Narumi and Rin Kaiho in the final of the slightly revamped 7th Ricoh Pair Go Championship on 14 January 2001. This ensures for Tokyo-ites that at long last the stranglehold of the Kansai Ki-in will be broken.
The final will take place in the Grand Regent Formosa Hotel in Taipei. The preceding rounds were all played in the TFT Hall in Koto Ward, Tokyo. Rounds 1 and 2 (full results below) were played on 2 December, and as before all pairs played two rounds, with the top scorers advancing to the next round on 9 December at the same venue. This year, however, the repechage round was omitted and some nifty calculations were required to separate pairs that had scored 1-1.
Instead of SOS - Sum of Opponents' Scores - SOA was used: Sum of Own Ages, with the wrinklies being favoured. The oldest pair was Ogawa and Ishida (49+52 = 101), whilst the youngest was Umezawa and Cho Sonjin (27+30 = 57), which perhaps tells us a lot about modern Japanese go.
The sponsors this year included Japan Asia Airways and Aurora Systems Corp. As before, a major proportion of the 6 million yen prize fund will go to primary schools to buy go equipment.
Go Seigen 9-dan, in sprightly form at the opening launch, said, "Pair go will be an appropriate symbol of the development [of the go world] in the 21st century. I am happy to act as the chief referee of this tournament. I am certain that pair go will continue to expand enormously."
7th RICOH RESULTS
This unique event in the pro scene has been taken over from the amateur world, where it is quickly increasing in popularity, acquiring a social atmosphere rather similar to that of bridge and whist drives in the west. It is sponsored by Ricoh Co. Ltd., office automation manufacturers, with support from the Yomiuri Shimbun under the umbrella of the Japan Pair Go Association, which is the main force in the amateur world. The event is also supported by the Nihon Ki-in, the Kansai Ki-in, the magazine Go Weekly (Shukan Go). Since 1999 games are also being broadcast on the IGS go server. Pictures of current participants can be found at http://www.joy.ne.jp/RICOH.
Top prize is nominally 5 million yen, but at least part is given to charity (in Term 1, 3 million yen was given to help spread go in schools and the rest to the find for the Hanshin earthquake). The event is more a chance for the public to see top pros in action. In Term1, 800 members of the public paid to join the players in Tokyo's Ebisu Garden Place.
After a qualifying event, sixteen pairs of professionals (one male and one female) from the Nihon Ki-in and the Kansai Ki-in take part in a knockout. The pairs were formed freely in Terms 1 and 2, but since then have been formed on the basis of the qualifying event except that established pairs are retained.
Currently, all pairs play in both Rounds 1 and 2. Those who win two games pass to Round 3 (the main knockout). The eight pairs from Rounds 1 and 2 who have won just one game are given a second chance to play off and the winners also pass to Round 3. The last eight pairs play a straight knockout down to a single-game final. (Term 1 was a straight knockout throughout.)
Time limits are 30-seconds a move except that on up to 15 occasions per side it is possible to spend up to one minute instead.
The special rules of pair go are that the women in each team start, then play is in strict rotation (woman-man-woman-man). No conferring is allowed except to discuss the option of resigning. Mistakes in play order are subject to a 3-point penalty if the opponents point out the mistake before playing themselves.
