Western Dan Challenge 2022

Anyone fancy it this year?

Set yourself a challenge for a number of Go games to play in February. Default is 100, but may be impractical for some (me included).

Games must be 19x19, vs another human, time limits greater than or equal to 1 min + 5x10s (no absolute time), and must start and end in the month of February 2022 (UCT).

The idea is to get more people playing more games on OGS.

Post your targets and results here.

And before you ask: no, I’m not offering prizes.

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That sounds fun, not sure I could do 100 games, though. Maybe 100 games in base 8? That would still require more than 2 games per day.

Even 100 games in base 2 would be an improvement for me haha, not that I’m a dan… (gee I wonder why :thinking: )

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I should probably set my goal to “less than 100 games”, and it will be hard :sweat_smile:
Sometimes I think, though, that I would like to try to reach 1500 or 2000. 1000 wasn’t easy but I could do more.

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Did the previous challenge have any impact?

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Maybe we should exclude the winners from last year?
@_Sofiam my guess is with rengo you could probably raise up your records.

Excluding anyone would defeat the point entirely. The whole purpose is to encourage more games.

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Well i didn’t really have the idea, i was just worrying on some addiction.

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How about a Western Rengo challenge (for all players, kyu or dan)?

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Do you have to be a dan? I thought the purpose was to improve towards dan level through playing games?

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Maybe in a different month so it’s not competing?

Nah the first one was a project by clossius to get more dans to play on OGS (his had prizes though)

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Ah, maybe I was thinking of discussion surrounding it. I thought it was a popular proposal to try and create our own dans instead of waiting around for existing ones.

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That’s a pretty cool idea (rengo)

In that case we could consider to

  • report a month (or two) later to give more time to our designer to ensure rengos to run as best as possible.

  • lower the bar (50?) because in the actual state seems to be a bit harder to get a rengo as a normal game.

  • find a prize even symbolic. (How you call these little stamps on your profile for AST again?)

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Yes, doing that in February seems a bit premature since there are still technical problems, but doing that later would be a nice way to promote Rengo on OGS. One rule could be to only take into account 2 vs 2 Rengos on a 19x19 board. One of the potential problems is to have an automatic way of counting the number of completed Rengo games played by a given user.

As for prizes, I don’t have much to offer apart from two AI-sensei vouchers (1 month + 2 weeks) that I didn’t use, assuming they don’t have an expiry date.

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Great! Do you think we should keep the idea to encourage “dan” to come play? In that case that each rengo has a dan player at least?

I fear that this condition would make it too difficult to find a game, unless you lower the bar a bit (e.g. the strongest player has to be at least 2k).

And assuming there is an automatic way to count the number of games which satisfy that condition.

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Maybe @Clossius1 could give some advices on how he handled it last year?

Last year the rule was different because to be in the “dan” category, you needed to be 3k or stronger on the first day of the challenge. It wasn’t necessary to check the level of opponents or the level of the players at each game.

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It certainly was around that time that we got a lot of new dan players on OGS, but I’m not sure if we can blame the Western Dan Challenge for that

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