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During registration on Saturday morning, Silvia was asked to participate in the German Women's Championship to make the total of participants an even number (6), and so they were able to play a round-robin tournament.
After this dramatic last minute change the event now had following participants:
- Manja Marz 3d
- Maike Wilms 2d
- Lena Gauthier 2k
- Karen Schombera 3k
- Yvonne Limbach 4k
- Silvia Hartig 8k
After 4 rounds it transpired that only Manja and Maike won all their games, and so the last round would be a clash between these two women to decide the champion for 2017.
The game was shown live on KGS, because of the competition with the German championship (only a few people saw the game between Maike and Manja live) that was held parallel and a lot of those games were also shown live on KGS and some were reviewed and commented live by Guo Juan.
In the end the game was decided by Maike winning a critical semeai, and so she became the new German champion, beating the European champion Manja.
All results can be found here.
The interview with Maike Wilms:
Recieving a trophy proved a good excuse for me to ask Maike for an interview, since she was traveling by train I offered to carry her trophy to Hamburg by car in exchange for an Interview :)I sent her a list of questions to prepare the interview, and as a reply I got back a short story in which the questions were answered. My questions for Maike Wilms and her answers:
Tony: How old are you?
Maike: I am 26 years old.
Tony: When did you learn go?
Maike: I learned the rules when I was nine years old, or at least enough so that I was able to play on a 9x9 board all by myself. When I was 17, I was captured by go again when I saw Hikaru no Go which was followed by an explaning (teaching) video about go and immediately I started to play go online on 19x19.
Tony: Who was your first teacher? And who is you teacher at this moment?
Maike: Shortly after I moved to Hamburg I was able to get lessons from Yoon Young Sun for several months. Later on I went to China for two months to learn go. There was nobody else apart from this, and I do not have any teacher at the moment.
Tony: When did you become shodan (2d and 3d)?
Maike: After a year with just "Attack & Defence" and playing every week at the go club I was able to reach a level of 1 kyu. At some point during the next two years this became a solid 1d. After two months of lessons in China this became a level of 2-3 dan in the summer of 2010.
Tony: What goals do you have in go?
Maike: now that I want to invest more time in go, I hope to get my level up to 2300+ (solid 3 Dan) so I will be able to play in the preliminary round for the German championship.
Also I like to play in the European Female Championship next year hoping for more surprises and to make some upsets there.
Tony: Did you also win other tournaments?
Maike: This was the first time I won a tournament. I did have some good results in tournaments as for instance at the Kido-Cup, these were however never good enough to win a tournament.
Tony How do you study go (game analysis, books)?
Maike: To be honest I do not have a lot of go books. At the moment I mainly study Tsumego, as I do have a big gap of knowledge for this part of the game. Furthermore I try to analyze games of professionals, concentrating mostly on the opening of the game... Where professionals tend to play strange moves.
Tony: How did you prepare for the German Championship?
Maike: I did not prepare myself especially for this Championship.
The main goal in tourmanments for me is: Keep calm and play your own game and do not forget to eat and drink.
Tony: Who is/are your favorite go player(s)?
Maike: the only professional I studied enough so I can build an honest opinion about him/her is AlphaGo. Even though I think it is cool the way it shows lot of new ideas, some of these ideas do not fit with my style of playing:
Tony: How and in what way did go change your life?
It definitely shifted my attention away from chess :)
Do you have other hobbies besides go?
At the moment I try to learn japanese and now and again I like to play speedruns (trying to play games as fast as possible).
Even though Guo Juan did not comment on any games for the German women championship, I would like to thank her here once more for the reviews she made during this weekend.
For me both German Championships showed a lot good games specially the playing level at the championship for females was a lot higher as expected from the individual grades of the participants.
My wish would be that a lot more is done to promote these tournaments and create more possibilities to raise the level of participants. A lot of very strong players now live in Europe, Yoon Young-Sun 8p in Hamburg and Guo Juan 5p in Amsterdam, the EGF and its members should do more to use these qualities available to help us raise the level of go in Europe.
