Almost 180 players registered, that’s covering easily the prizes already without counting the income from sponsors.
Less players as the usual real life thing (but much less costs in my guess) so indeed a success for the organization.
Actually that’s more than usual.
2016: 152 players
2017: 134 players
2018: 100 players
2019: 133 players
2020: no tournament
O thanks, I had some too old memory not updated with like 300 (even more?)
There were about 300 participants or more from 2004 to 2009. Numbers decreased when the tournament started to take place in the suburbs instead of the center of Paris.
Or when people started to play online and didn’t feel so much need to spend the money and time to travel to play IRL games?
Here are some more details:
Paris 2009: 347
Antony 2010: 224
Antony 2011: 167
Antony 2012: 134
Paris 2013: 219
Neuilly 2014: 66.
Location of the tournament is certainly important. People who come from far away want to do some sightseeing, so prefer when the tournament takes place in a central location.
On the other hand, the long-term trend is a decrease of participation. Online play may be a factor as you say. Another factor is the decrease of active players after the Hikaru no Go wave.
When you go from over 300 to 66, it would be a too easy explaination to make internet go the cause of the decrease unless a huge drop like this happened in all the IRL tournaments.
But the location doesn’t seem to be a great explanation either for dropping to 66. Assuming you stay in Neuilly it would just take you 10min to reach Paris by subway (and you might as well directly stay in Paris if you want to go sight-seeing).
It’s like saying “I wanted to see Manhattan so if it’s in Brooklyn I’m not coming”.
Well Neuilly is not at 10mn of the Eiffel tower, or Louvres or Quartier Latin or… But I won’t argue too much on that. Neuilly is 10mn of the boundary of Paris maybe.
It’s just weird that this tournament was one of the biggest of Europe for many years. I dunno why this went lost.
Question: I’m looking at the names of participants and I recognized a couple that I think are pros, but I don’t see the usual “p” in their ranks. Are they assigned a Dan rank for the pairing system to work better? Is it specific for this tournament? How does this work? I also recognize some names but on EGD they are Dan, not pro, and now I’m even more confused.
Basically two questions:
-Is there a reason in some tournaments (for example in the AGA ones, I remember we see pros as p rank) pros as p and in some pros are Dan?
-Is there an easy way to know who’s what? Some may not be on EGD or I can’t find them, and I would like to check some players here and there when I find games.
Looking at some of the strong players, like Seong-Jin for instance, they do have both a d-rank and a p-rank. But it looks like this p-rank is derived from rating rather than reflecting pro status? (Seong-Jin does not have a professional rank as far as I know).
Regardless, it’s worth noting that real pro ranks are not measures of strength, so they don’t make much sense to use for pairing or handicap calculation. I think if you ever see pro ranks displayed in a tournament, they are only displayed as some extra info, not used in any way. (just like it could be interesting to display the age for each player, but we wouldn’t use that number for pairing)
EGF rating is a nice system because it does reflect strength, and most active players in Europe have a (somewhat accurate) rating that can be directly compared with anyone else in the same system 
I see
It would be helpful to signal by something (maybe a Pro before their name, like Dr. :-P) that they are pros, so that we populus know and go watch their game. 
But if “amateur” player A is stronger than pro player P, wouldn’t you rather watch the amateur game?
I understand nothing any which way.
You can just watch the top tables that’s quality stuff anyway. And later check if one of these players are pros.
Artem Kachanovskyi is the only pro in the tournament.
I thought the PINs to new people would be sent relatively fast, but I see tournaments currently uploaded are from February… :-/ I guess I’ll get mine in the Summer, right on time for my birthday.
If I understand well and you talk about your reference number in the EGF data’s, it should be pretty quick as these data are used in next coming tournament.