Nordic Go Dojo

The first-ever Pixel Go Tournament will be held this Saturday (October 31), 12–15 o’clock Helsinki Time (eet, or gmt+2) on the Variant Go Server. Participation is free, and the top two places will receive €80 and €40 respectively as ngd vouchers which can be used for online league participation, offline reviews of games (€20 apiece), or digital copies of Antti’s books.

The tournament uses Variant Go Server rules, namely Chinese scoring (neutral intersections are worth points) and positional superko.

White receives a seemingly large komi of 25.5 points. This is because of the special quality of pixel go, where each regular move in itself is worth 4 points. If fair komi in regular 9×9 is 6–7 points, it should be 24–28 points in pixel go, and 25.5 is the lowest of the available odd values with a half-point as a tie-breaker.

Time limits are 5 minutes main time + 10 seconds Fischer increment.

The tournament is held in two stages. First, participants are randomly divided into leagues of 4 players each, in which everybody plays each other. The player with the most wins in each league proceeds to a knockout tournament. If two players have the same number of wins, the winner of the mutual game proceeds. Colours are predetermined in the league stage and randomly chosen by the tournament organiser in the knockout stage.

Tournament-related information and pairings will be sent to all participants by email on the day of the tournament. Throughout the event, our Twitch channel will be live, commenting on the games and explaining pixel go strategy.

You can register to the tournament here.

You can read more about pixel go strategy in the Pixel Go 101 and Pixel Go 102 posts.