The third stage of the first season of the SEYGO Tour 2019 took place in Zaostrog, Croatia. The tournament was held on July 2-4, 2019, as the highlight of the Summer Go Camp lasting from Monday, 1st July to Monday, 8th July. Hostel Zaostrog is located few steps from a nice beach. It has all necessary facilities for great holidays in green, peaceful environment. We had to make the reservation of the venue one year in advance, worried a bit if there will be enough children and youth willing to play go in the summer. Although it was the first season of SEYGO Tour and it was the first summer go camp in Croatia, the interest was above all expectations. Fortunately, it was possible to find additional accommodation nearby. It is difficult to compare 1500 kilometers long journey for Romanian bus or families coming from Ukraine using various ways of transport with the car with Russian plates suddenly appearing at the playing site.

The SEYGO Tour Summer Go Camp in Zaostrog was a unique event in many ways:

• all games (30 in each of 6 rounds) were played outside, with a great view to the crystal-clear sea, with top games played in botanical garden of the famous monastery,
• top games were recorded automatic image recognition sofware available for iPads,
• the tsumego competition engaged all players for next two days – a lot of children spent more time solving problems than playing tournament games,
• the Diving Go tournament brought all of us under water, making a perfect balance between fun, physical and mental activity,
• workshops on Chinese language, calligraphy and martial arts were combined with swimming lessons and disco evenings, filling every day with a lot of joy.

Of course, we had enough time for classical go activities: lessons held by Catalin Taranu, 5p, and Park Ji-Young, 2p, simultaneous games by professionals and dan-players, and a relay-go tournament.

Tournaments

According to the unique SEYGO Tour format, we had 63 players in three age groups: 38 players in U12, 17 players in U16, and 7 players in U20. All of them were playing in a single open tournament. As soon as we had just enough participants in a particular age group, the Knock-Out process begun. At the end, we had clear winners of each of three Knock-Outs. In the group U20 the winner was Elian Grigoriu, 5d from Romania, who won all his games. In the group U16 it was Polina Kruselnytska, 3kyu from Ukraine, who won the final game against Davide Bernardis, 1d from Italy. It was even more dramatic in the group U12: Anna Melnyk, 5kyu from Ukraine, won the semi-final game against Stefan Rotarita, 1kyu from Romania, but the winner was Olesia Malko, 4kyu from Ukraine. 

The prize fund for each age group consisted of unique SEYGO Vouchers in value of 150, 100, 50 and 50 EUR for places 1, 2, 3 and 4, making 1.050,00 EUR in total. SEYGO Vouchers are multi-purpose and can be used to cover costs of accommodation and meals in future SEYGO events or EYGC, or to cover fees for EGF Academy, as described at the SEYGO Project webpage.

Aside from the “official” section, 10 beginners who barely knew the rules of the game before coming to Zaostrog, advanced a lot through the workshops and played their first serious tournament.

There were special medals for each of four categories of the best “tsumego-solvers”. All children got T-shirts, backpacks, bottles and certficates. We enjoyed a boat trip to Gradac, raising the visibility of Go with SEYGO Tour shirts.

The elimination phase of U12, U16 and U20 group is graphically presented in form of Knock-Out Trees. 

The results of all games are available in European Go Database.

Gallery („a picture is worth a thousand words“): Pictures from Zaostrog

Videos („a video is worth a thousand pictures“):

• Video about the whole Camp
• Video about Diving Go

Croatian Igo Alliance organized the event with the support of Croatian Central State Office for Sports, Ministry of Science of Education, City of Jastrebarsko, Konfucius Institute of the University of Zagreb and Tourist Offices of Gradac and Zaostrog. The tournament attracted a lot of attention of local media – it seems that the game of go will fit the new “black-and-white” branding of Zaostrog.

The next SEYGO Tour Summer Go Camp has already been scheduled for the week 29th June – 6th July 2020. Save the date!