Starting Friday March 8th a 3 round, double-elimination tournament will commence. It will select two of our strongest professional players to represent North America in the Ing Professional Tournament beginning April 21, 2024. This will be the 10th edition of the ING cup, featuring the largest winner's prize in Go, of 400K USD. Dr. Ernest Brown, a long time organizer and Go educator in San Francisco, will direct the North American qualifying. Wait... this sounds familiar you say? Well that's because last weekend we held the first part of the Quzhou-Lanke Cup Qualifiers and the weekend before that we had the Chunlan Cup Qualifiers! And we'll also be watching our same 4 heroes; Ryan Li 4p, Alexander Qi 1p, Mingjui Jiang 7p, and Michael Chen 1p. Hopefully Mr. Qi and Mr. Chen don't exhaust themselves too much because their deciding match for the second North American spot for the Quzhou-Lanke Cup will be happening on Tuesday, March 12th at 7:30pm. The Ing qualifiers matches will occur on Friday March 8th at 7pm EST / 4pm PSTSaturday March 9th at 4pm EST / 1pm PSTSunday March 10th at 4pm EDT* / 1pm PDT**don't forget about daylight savings time The time settings are 1 hour each player with 5 times 60 second overtime. For those wanting to see the action live, they can tune in to the BadukClub Twitch and the commentators will be: Friday: James Sedgwick 5D and Dandi Li 1KSaturday: Nate Morse 6D and Taylor Shu 1pSunday: Sathya Singh 4D and Ben Mantle 5DThe games are being broadcast on OGS, where you can see them live as well. In 2024 the event will return to its full glory! Previous editions featured no more than 30 participants, in 2024 there will be a field of 58 players. 6 players should be seeded to the second round, which is why a full 64 player field isn't needed. A total prize pool of 689K USD will be up for grabs, with 400K of that going to the winner. Even in the first round most competitors are top 50 in the world. This is a great opportunity for our NA stars to face the world's best! The Cup Professional Go Championship started in 1988 and has completed 9 editions. With the largest prize pool in the Go world, and it's "once every four years" format it is sometimes referred to as the "Olympics of Go". In the 9 editions so far Korean players have won the championship 6 times, with Shin Jin-seo(the latest winner), Lee Chang-ho, and Choi Cheol-han among the famous Korean names claiming the title. Chinese players have won the championship 3 times, their winners being Chang Hao, Fan Tingyu and Tang Weixing. The 9th ING cup scheduled for 2020 actually only finished in 2023, with pandemic delays. Ryan Li represented North America in that edition, resigning to Zhao Chenyu 8P at move 90 in September 2020.
