Ready for the challenge

taken from my 2 weeks old diary post...

I got up this morning at 10:13 o'clock and switched off my alarm-clock. I went back to sleep. I woke up again at 10:49, noticing that I'm late from my guitar-class. Luckily I was able to provide some extra time for a shower. After showering and finding some clean clothes was the time for breakfast. I had a hot coco and a banana. As the banana started disappearing into my stomach, I could feel the sweat and a little bit chilly pieces of banana getting chopped moving to my cheeks. I felt a bit like a squirrel. I looked outside thinking about squirrels and saw the bus I was supposed to get on passing our house.

On the way to guitar class I met one of my random pick-up girls. We had a short chat before our roads departed. She said she was just starting high-school so she was just 15!!! o.0 I can't belive myself (and she so didn't look like it I swear, andandand)... talking to random 15yo girls in the bus. FUUU ><



Ready for the challenge

During the EGC 2010 the top-european players had a meeting. The Eurogotv-head Harry made an announcement that he would be creating EuroGoPro-League, where 12 top europeans get a professional status for 1 year. There were also many young players attending the meeting. All the participants were at least 5d egf, I think (appart from harry, the future CEO of EuroGoPro). Tenbabo, my rival (name modified) was sitting next to me and all the people seemed really interested in the topic. The mood was some what tense but filled with some jokes such as, Catalin 5p: Burzo, looks like you have to start studying again (*laughter*) xD.

It seemed like the top-players had been waiting for something like this for long, since making a living with Go is pretty much impossible in europe. Howerver, the understanding and level of these Go-masters cannot be reached easily even with hundreds of hours of stydy. Every session with a stronger player is an enlighting experience. Very few people think these top-players should earn some money with Go and the truth pretty much is that you get better salary flipping burgers (unless you are Michael Jackson) than with teaching Go. Nevertheless teaching Go for me is only 50% job and 50% fun and that's why I accept lower price for my lessons than most 5d+ players.

With the EuroGoPro stuff every player would have their own sponsor and these Pro's would get ~800€/month. That's actually enough to make a living out of it! In addition your trips would be paid for EuroGoPro-tournaments.
I'm so glad I didn't go last spring... I would've missed all the nice things life still has to offer me.



The dream to be a EuroPro seems very distant, I evaluated that egf-players with 2610 go-rating points would enter in EuroPro system. However, I expect the level to increase a little with the competition to fill those 12 spots. During the next 10 months the Gor limit might increase to +2630-2650.

One of the most difficult parts in life is after high-school, since you are finally free from school, but you should perhaps for the first time in your life choose the path which you want to follow.

I won't be relying my only card on Go as a profession. It has been my dream for many years to become a businessman, like my dad (though, not as crappy one),whom I respect very much. This school year there is going to be so many things to do. I need good grades from school and from march I have to start studying for business school exams which will be in June. It's said to be very difficult to get into that university...

My wildest dream is to make it to that business university & EuroGoPro at the same time! I'm not sure if it's even possible, but what would our lives be without Goals and Dreams?

To be honest I'm not sure if I can get even into one of my 2 options. I might even fail both. but I'm willing to work towards my dream.

And I'm taking up this Challenge

Results EGC 2010

Dear readers

The EGC is over for this year. The EGC 2010 in tampere was probably one of the most memorable congresses for many people. Incase you don't already know Ilya Shiksin 7d and Artem Kachanovskyj 6d got the 1st and 2nd places, which is pretty amazing for european Go since they are leading the new generation of european top-players.
17-year-old Ali Jabarin was the strongest 5 dan and ended up in 10th place beating a Korean 7dan and Ondrej Silt 6dan.

Artem's chance for winning the whole tournament slipped by his hands as he lost from a winning position to Kim Jung-hyeop 7d by 0,5 points. I estimated that Artem lost a couple of thousand euros there :), nevertheless he smiled a little bit at the prize giving ceremony.
Ilya Shiksin's last game against Dinerstein was very long and there was a rumour going on that Dinerstein had said the night before that he would lose on purpose to Ilya, incase Artem lost. There is actually a high chance that this rumour is true.. russians...

My tournament didn't go well, but I had a great time at EGC 2010 tampere. I made some new friends and got to know better some people. I had some achievements at EGC though,

• EGC Team-tournament 1st place (Gimbap Power!)
• EGC Bonus tournament 1st place (I heard I got more applause than the EGC winner)
• Winning Cornel Burzo in rapid :)



To End this post I'd like to tell a funny story about my good friend "Pikku-Jussi" 7dan (4th place), who told me that he quite often sleeps during his games.
He was living at our playboy mansion and slept usually ~2-6 hours per day and even gave his own bed to our random guests (some of these guests showed no appreciation whatsoever and left the place messy) and slept on the sofa o.0. Once he slept outside because he didn't have the keys to our appartment ><.



On our way back to Helsinki on sunday evening (We cleaned up EGC -place whole sunday) our train was badly late. We were killing time in the bar of the train station and we noticed there was a karaoke!!! Oh boy we had such a great time in korean karaokes, so ofcourse I wanted to challenge Little-Yoshi (pikku-jussi) to sing together with me. The variety of songs in the karaoke was very low and crappy, but finally we decided to sing Celine Dion - My Hear Will Go On :D
Our performance was already somewhat legendary with the two of us. Then all of a sudden Ilya Shiksin 7dan appeared out of nowhere and sang the rest of the song with all his heart. I ofcourse laughed my ass off. After our song some girls showed thumbs up for us :)
We managed to get our whole performance on video. Unfortunately Little-Yoshi threatened to kill me if I leaked the video to the internet and he even gave me some painful demonstrations of what he would do to me x).
I guess I will publish the video here later =)

Thx everyone for the great congress!!!

EGC Thursday 5th August. Bonus&Team tournament

Dear friends

This week many stuff has happened. My main tournament hasn't gone too good, but at least I didn't lose to anyone under 6 dan.

My main tournament after round 8:
5p-,4d+,5d+,6d-,7d-,6d-,3d+ 3/7 :(

On tuesday there was a bonus tournament, for which Chief and me made a bet. If I would win, Chief would buy me 10 beers if he won I'd buy him one beer. For those who don't know what is a bonus tournament, it's a combination of Go and drinking. You get points for drinking and playing Go. Ofcourse the best combination for getting the most points is drinking and winning games.

The tournament started on tuesday at 18:00 in a local bar called S-something. I started the tournament very faaaaast. The games were basically lightning games and in normal circumstances it would have been difficult to play and drink, since it takes quite much concentration to play Go. Anyways I discovered later that my strategy seemed to be playing really fast and drinking on my opponents time. Some of my opponents lost on time and some just died everywhere :). I didn't even realize how time went so fast I played 20 games and won 19 of them and drank a lot. After about 6 hours had passed there and I had played my maximum amount of games there was 10 minutes left. I managed to drink 1 liter more before the time finished :). I don't really like beer so I was drinking perry light -cider, which tasted like water with apple juice.

I ended up pretty drunk and we went to party to.. love hotel!!! .. and I drank some more. While moving from bar S to love hotel it was raining heavily so our running looked like chickens run. One of us called "vatipää" slipped and dived on the street x), luckily he was alright appart from his bleeding elbow. At love hotel the doorman didn't want to let "vatipää" in because he didn't have any shoes. One of us who was already inside the club gave "vatipää" his own shoes and went to the club bare foot. That doorman was pretty easy to trick :).

I managed to have some conversation with the opposite sex of the human species, but I realized, maybe I shouldn't have for the sake of my mental health x). The girls were horrible...
We managed to get home after the night club finnished at around 4am. I went straight to sleep and slept like a baby for the next 6 hours.

In the morning I felt pretty good, since last night had been awesome. I took some hot chocolate and a glass of milk, but suddenly my head started feeling like a watermelon and I got reaaally dizzy, so I had to stop my breakfast. I lied in my bed feeling really sick, like I could puke. After one hour of lying silent on my bed and ocationally discussing what should I do, someone told me: "be a man", so I went to the toilet and puked 2 times. It was funny to look the bathroom mirror afterwards. I looked like a zombie with red eyes :P. After coming back from the toilet I was so happy to be alive again, I felt considerably better, though a bit exhausted from all the drinking from previous night.

Too bad I had to play in the team-tournament in my hangover condition and we had to leave very soon. It was nice to breathe fresh air outside, but I wouldn't have minded staying at home to rest either.

The team-tournament started on wednesday at 13:15 o'clock. Our teams name was "Gimbap Power!" and it consisted of 3 koreans on boards 1,2,3 and me and a belgian guy on the 4th and 5th boards.
Our first 2 games were relatively easy, but then we played against team Excecution... they were pretty strong with 4x 5 dans and 1x 6 dan. I lost my game against Nikola. His Go-style is very impressive and I think he is the worst kind of opponent for me. Luckily our Koreans did their job and won their games, we went into the finals.
In the finals we played against team Romania, which consisted of 5p,7d,6d,5d and 4d. I was playing against Lucian Corlan from Romania.
Our opening was strangely peaceful, though I lost my thickness pretty efficiently, while he got small groups. During the late part of middle game I managed to cut a group of his and he got into trouble. The result was a easy Ko for me, but he had many ko-threats.
All of the other games ended, our boards 1 and 5 lost and 2 and 3 won, So the result was 2-2 and my game would be the deciding game of the tournament.
Lucian tenukied my ko-threat and I started another ko somewhere else. The ko seemed a bit difficult for me to win. I played and interesting jump to his territory, incase he tried to cut off my stone, my ko-threats would increase. He made a decision to cut my stone, so I managed to get loads of ko-threats. He was in a time trouble and had only a couple of minutes left in his clock. The match was not even close to be over, and the most intense action of the match started as he ignored my threat. I surrounded his stones and he did the same to me.. an intense capturing race occurred. I lived in my corner and he connected out. I played the winning sequence which connected my stones out with a bonus, he got some compensation, but all of his territory was destroyed. A few seconds later he lost on time.
Gimbap Power!!! So we got the 1st place at the team-tournament :)

Today I had the easiest game of EGC against a french 3dan. Altough he played pretty poorly (He didn't really die anywhere big, but he just lacked common sense in strategy), I must say he is quite impressive to be a dan player and 14 years old! When I was 14 years old I was 30 kyu!

I finnished that game early so I went to buy an awesome pullover finally after almost 1 week.