World’s First Pixel Go Tournament on October 31

Published 9 Oct 2020 by antti (last edited 29 Oct 2020)

Registration and tournament details

List of registered participants

On October 31, we will hold the first-ever Pixel Go Tournament on the Variant Go Server programmed by seequ! This tournament is free for everybody to participate, and the top two players will each get an ngd voucher for use in their studies. Besides ngd league participations, they can also be exchanged for offline reviews of freely chosen games for €20 per game.

The tournament format will be decided closer to the tournament once we have an idea on the number of participants, but all participants will get to play at least two tournament games. Relatively quick time controls will be enforced if the feature gets implemented on the server in time. During the event, we will hold a Twitch stream commenting on the top games and explaining pixel go tactics.

The registration for the tournament is here (you don’t need an ngd account, but must provide a valid email address) and the current list of registrants is here.

For those unfamiliar with pixel go (most of you), below is a brief explanation of this interesting go variant:

Let’s use this common 9×9 opening as a starting point. The idea in pixel go is that the board has been ‘magnified’, making the ‘1×1 stones’ here...
...into these ‘2×2 blobs of stones’. Therefore, the previous 9×9 board would translate to the 18×18 board shown here, and these board situations are fairly similar in nature.
What separates pixel go from ‘ugly 9×9’ is that it’s still played on a 19×19 board and that you are not forced to play moves that place exactly four stones on the board: your move can partially ‘overlap’ with existing stones on the board, like black 3 here. This last feature is the most distinctive part of pixel go, and creates tactics and strategies very unlike regular go!
Some surprising special cases also exist, such as the seemingly two separate black eyes at a that do not make the black group live; white a constitute a single move and therefore capture the black group.

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