El Draco

My real name is Emile Wester and I'm a dutch 28 yo male. You can sometimes find me playing on KGS with nickname ElDraco. I may also use Ryuu (dragon) or its kanji 竜 (if possible) as a nickname, but it's mostly 'El Draco'.

Like Herman Hiddema, I was motivated by HikaruNoGo to have another go at this game, since it was already two years ago that I followed a beginner's course at the Groningen Go Club and hadn't played since then.

Currently I'm following a course in Japanese language because of my interest in Japanese anime. I'm doing this together with [Herman Hiddema[ and as you can see on his page, we're often trying to find the translations of go terms. Because of many different readings, this is often cause for debate, since there seems to be some misunderstanding of them by a lot of people.

Hope to travel to Japan in the foreseeable future, maybe even work there. If I could get a job at an ICT company in Japan, that would be marvellous. Something related to Go would also be nice. :) If anyone has any suggestions or connections, I'd be grateful.

Have progressed a little over the past weeks. Have really begun playing go now and am around 10th kyuu perhaps. It's really beginning to be a fun game for me! Hope I'll make 1-5 kyuu before the end of this year which shouldn't be too high a goal I think.
Also, I've completed the 4th japanese course, going onwards to the 5th. I think Japanese is a very 'omoshiroi' (interesting) language. Learning Japanese also makes it lot easier to understand go terms (and juujutsu terms which I'm also doing lately), especially since so many people seem to misunderstand the meanings (and I don't have to depend on them anymore :) ).

Made my first wiki page JapaneseGoPronunciations. I hope people that were wondering about Japanese pronunciation will find it useful.

I'm around 3rd kyuu now. Haven't progressed a lot for some time, since I don't spend enough time on Go, but I'm trying to devote more quality time on studying Go and getting to Dan level.

In the weekend of 6-7 november 2004, there was a great tournament in Groningen called the Martini Cup. For photos of the tournament, go to http://www.goclubgroningen.nl and click on the photo of Radek Nechanicky.