About
Links
Mateusz Surma 3p and Andrii Kravets 1p, respectively winner and runner-up of the last European Professional Go Championship, will compete in the 10th Ing Cup World Professional Championship this month. We will (try) to follow the games and the outcome of the event for our players!
You may have heard of the Ing rules in your go career, or may have seen special sets of bowls with cylinders to hold the stones at a tournament. Well, if you didn't know about it already, now you will understand.
The Ing Cup is sponsored by the Ing Chang-ki Weiqi Educational Foundation, named after a Chinese player who put great effort into promoting the game of go and trying to unify tournament rules.
The Ing foundation has supported European tournaments many times, including the EGC and Youth Go Championships. Happening only every four years, the Ing Cup is famous for its special rules (Ing rules), including these go bowls we mentioned: they are designed to hold exactly 180 stones (and not a single stone more!) and allow for a special counting method to take place at the end of the game.
Also, in Ing rules, you can commit suicide with at least two stones! That means tsumego take on a whole different dimension, for those who are not familiar with the concept.
In the previous edition, played in 2020 but concluded in 2023 due to COVID-19, the Ing Cup featured Ali Jabarin 2p representing our European pros, but was won by... (take a guess...1, ...2,...3...) Shin Jinseo 9p from Korea, the highest-rated player in the world.
Will he be able to repeat this impressive result this year too? We will find out. But first, let's also find out about the adventure facing Andrii and Mateusz.
The tournament will start on April 20th with 56 players and two qualifying rounds, played online on the Fox Weiqi server. As soon as the information is available, the pairings will mostly likely be published here.
After the qualifying stage, only the 14 strongest will remain and they will then be joined by the two best players of the previous Ing Cup (Shin Jinseo 9p and Xie Ke 9p). The tournament system is a knock out until the semi-finals (top 4), which will be played as best-of-three matches. The final will be played as a best-of-five match.
Schedule
April 20-21: qualifying rounds (56 players, online on Fox Weiqi, two rounds)* in these matches, stone suicide is not allowed, unfortunately for the spectators!
July 3: preliminary rounds (16 players, in Shanghai)
July 4: intermediate rounds (8 players, in Shanghai)
July 6-8-9: semi-finals (in Ningbo)
August 12-14: first and second games of the final
October 24-26-28: last three games of the final
Games start at 12:00 UTC+8 (so... 6am in most European countries?).
The location of the final games will be determined at a later date.
The prize money for the winner is 400,000 USD, and 100,000 USD for the runner-up.
For the qualifying rounds and preliminary, intermediate rounds are played with 2h main time, an additional 20 minutes can be given in exchange for a two-point penalty.
Good luck to our pros, may they play their best and impress us!
To be continued...!
Updates --
Well, unfortunately for Mateusz and Andrii and for us, public, they both lost their first game against strong opponents and therefor got eliminated.
Mateusz played with Xie Erhao 9p from China, who somewhat got an habbit of crushing the European hopes as he had also beaten Benjamin Dréan-Guénaïzia back-then European Champion at the Mlily Cup not long ago.
Xie erhao won the second game and qualified for the next round.
Andrii player with Huang Mingyu 6p, who despite bad results over the last few games he played and lost, has proven he was strong enough to shake some of the top actual players.
But...not enough this time, as Huang Mingyu had to resign to Shin Minjun 9p (one of the "top actual players") in the second game.