Signage
Just past 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday, May 27, with the words ‘The third round will now begin,’ chief referee Lingkai Chen announced the commencement of the third round. Fifteen minutes later he resolutely awarded the first win by forfeit to John Gibson of Ireland, whose opponent had still not appeared. The other twenty-nine games, however, were all progressing smoothly.
After the first two rounds, all but one of the fifteen players with two wins had taken black and white in one game each, so following the Chinese system, they were paired for the third round in order of the player numbers they had drawn before the tournament began. The highest numbered (1, Korea) played the second highest (5, Canada) and so on down to the fifteenth highest in this group (57, Sweden), who played the highest numbered player (2, Germany) in the one-win group. The one-win and zero-win groups were paired similarly, with the lowest numbered player in the one-win group (60, Vietnam) being drawn down against the highest numbered player in the zero-win group (7, Chile). All very clear and fair.
Cheng-hsun Chen
In the top group, this system produced a boatload of interesting matches. Taewon Jo of DPR Korea, who had defeated Yohei Sato of Japan in the second round, now found himself facing 11-year-old Cheng-hsun Chen of Chinese Taipei. The game began with two variations of the avalanche joseki in adjacent corners. This led to a large-scale game with each side amassing over a hundred points worth of territory, including captured enemy groups. Facing an imperturbable opponent, Chen appeared to be in a state of high anxiety in the middle game as referees, reporters, and players whose games had already finished began to gather around the board to watch. At the end, however, he was playing with quick confidence, and sure enough, he had the game won on the board, not even needing the 6.5-point compensation.
This win was perhaps a slight surprise, but the real upset occurred on the twentieth board, where Maria Puerta (3-kyu) of Venezuela defeated Wan-kao Lou (5-dan) of Macau. ‘For most of the game he was in control,’ Puerta said. ‘He had a big territory and I had some dead groups, but then late in the game he let me capture four stones. Perhaps it was just lack of caution on his part, but that four-stone capture joined all my groups together, and inside the large space surrounded by them there was a group of his that only had one eye. He still had his big territory left, but it wasn’t enough, so he resigned.’ The players having lunch on the in the 34th floor gave the lady from Venezuela a big round of applause when she entered the restaurant. Another winning lady was Francesca Mauri of Italy, who defeated Joseph Michael Galero of the Philippines.
On the other top boards, the players from China, Hong Kong, and Korea remained undefeated by beating opponents from Israel, Canada, and Austria. A pair of North and South Americans also remained defeated: Thomas Hsiang (7-dan, USA) overcame a strong challenge by David Ormerod (5-dan, Australia), and Fernando Aguilar (7-dan, Argentina) defeated Pal Balogh (6-dan, Hungary). Leszek Soldan (5-dan) of Poland likewise remained undefeated, beating Kamon Santipojana (4-dan) of Thailand, and in an all-European match, 18-year-old Frederik Blomback (5-dan) from Sweden scored his third straight win by handing veteran Christoph Gerlach (6-dan) of Germany his second loss. In the next round, the four undefeated Far Eastern players take on the four undefeated players from Europe and the Americas.
James Davies
