Kylmä kivi – Cold stone (tournament)

25th July, is the name day of Jaakko (Jaakonpäivä, illustration from Google doodles). (From Wikipedia:) According to an old Finnish legend, Jaakko throws a cold stone in the waters on 25th of July, on his name day, symbolically freeing himself of the burden of sins. (Which in turn refers to the religious myths of St. James' Road to Santiago.)

The myth of Jaakko and the cold stone was believed to be the reason for the cooling of waters, and generally marked the end of mid-Summer and nearing of Autumn.

Cold stones, indeed... We actually think they need warming up. So...



 
After a short planning session with a friend from our club, we decided to host a small one day flash tournament of our own, a week and a half from now, on the Saturday 25th of July. We've also reserved a cabinet with some tables from a local cafeteria.

This will be exciting. We haven't had any tournaments of our own yet, and since our club is a relatively new one, and in a relatively non-typical town for go, it might eventually spark some extra interest towards us. As we are not yet official, the tournament is merely "just for fun", but we can expect to see quality games just as likely.

The tournament will start at 10:00 in the morning, and will end at 18:00, there will be four rounds and a lunch break. It'll be a EGF Class C MacMahon handicap tournament with Japanese rules, although I am not proficient enough to translate the handicap system here, so I'll skip the technicals. Sorry about that. The timing of each game will be a 25 minutes maintime + a Canadian Byo-Yomi of 25 moves / 3 minutes.

We haven't actually decided on the prices yet, but we'll definitely be discussing that over at our next game night, I presume.

After the tournament, the participants and spectators can come relax with us over a pint at the docks.

So, how about that? We are definitely making progress here. And I'm very excited to see who will attend and if how it affects our own club's image and popularity in the future.

It's fun, because on 23rd, like I mentioned in a previous blog post, we'll most likely also be attending the NGA tournament in Espoo.

Btw. sorry about the linked tournament information being in Finnish only, as I couldn't find relevant linkable info for the NGA tournament in English, and ours is actually only written in Finnish. Since the tournament is a small local tournament we didn't really have the need to translate it. But if we manage to pull this one off, we might very well be inclined to push and grow it next year.

So, without a furder ado, I'll bid thee farewell again, and wish you many very interesting and fun games, until next time. See ya!


^^