As you may have realised, there was no issue of the CongressNews on Saturday as planned. The reason for this is not that we finally resigned or the Italian organisation broke down, nor that we ran out of money or anything like that.
The reason is that we had a very unpleasant Friday evening and just couldn’t do “business as usual”. What happened? Everything started with a joke in the entertainment section of issue 2 that alarmed the executive of the EGF. Alan Held, the president of the EGF (European Go Federation), complained to Gionata Soletti that we should not print anything like that again. What came first to our mind was, “Why is he talking to Gionata and not to us?” Secondly, since our concept for this bulletin is to give you a platform where you cn find all + and - of the congress, we do believe in freedom of speech very strongly and we did not accept this first try to put pressure on us, especially because it came through the backdoor which is not the way we usually interact with other people.
We contacted Alan Held the next day. He reacted in a quite harsh way and didn’t show any respect for us and our beliefs. Anyway we were ready to compromise in submitting to major concepts of the EGF (very close to self-censorship) as this matter came to discussion at the EGF meeting on Friday. What happened then was the worst personal experience that ever happened to us while arguing with other go players. We almost lost our belief in what and for whom we were working. There was only one thing in the mind of the executive and the delegates at the EGF meeting: Money, money and again money. The fear of losing money was that big that they lost any self-control. It made us feel very sad that there was no one to stand up and say something like, “Come to your senses; you are all go players and must not talk in such a disparaging and deeply offensive way!” But nothing happened. T.M. Hall shut us up with “Don’t be childish!” After the meeting he came to us and said, “Sorry, but…”. We didn’t listen to what he said.
After this very disappointing incident we almost decided to stop the CongressNews. Early Saturday morning it was clear that there would not be a weekend issue. Because of the long discussions all through the night the issue would have been very poor in quality and quantity, so we skipped this issue. It was ridiculous to stop a journal for 400 readers only because of some EGF officials “losing their cool” as Alan Held apologized afterwards. Also we promised Gionata to do the journal at his congress in Italy (sorry for robbing you of your sleep on Friday night).
So this issue 4 is almost a double issue (36 pages thick) with lots of articles from you, the readers and participants of the congress. A lot of pages are occupied by the results from the first week of the main tournament and the weekend tournament. We hope to present more games again in the next issue which will be published on Thursday (articles have to reach us Wednesday evening no later than 20:00).
The CongressNews Syndicate
PS. Thanks to everyone who is supporting us (The mediator Manfred, Jan, Gionata, the proofreaders, Andreas, Harald, …).
Title:
Guo Juan is leading the Main Tournament after the first week with a perfect score of five wins so far.
In this Web edition the commented games from the original CongressNews are missing. To transform all the diagrams is too time consuming.
The CongressNewsWebEdition Syndicate
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