Spanish Championship Finals : A psychological view

By | 2007-01-22

Dimas in light On the last weekend I was helping in the course of the Spanish Go Championship Finals. I went to note down the games played by the 8 candidates in my laptop. But luckily I discovered an open WiFi net, therefore I decided to broadcast in live the games, on KGS (a Go server). I was happy to see a lot of people watching my broadcast (around 30 observers in the 3rd round), and thanking me for my comments.

In my comments I didn’t focus on the board situation (I can roughly understand what a Dan player is thinking), but I described the faces of the players. In Go, as in any confrontational game, the “psychological game” has a lot of weight. Sometimes they put a stone on the board with a strong hit, remarking security or angriness; other times they put it with a calm and subtle movement, like telling you it’s not an important move (or a deep-thought one). The faces also showed the mood, the stress, the tiredness. And finally I also wrote where their eyes where looking. “Dimas is burning the board around H-6 with his eyes”, for example.

Some of the observers discovered a new way to improve in the game. And eventually they started to ask me: where is he pointing his eyes?, what can you tell us about his face?, etc.

Finally Dimas won the Finals, getting the right of a place for the next World Amateur Go Championship, in Japan. Also I have to mention Oscar, a young player (age 17), who got a place for the Korean Prime Minister Cup, in Korea, thanks to his good results in this Finals.