Hiseikai

The Hiseikai (裨聖會) was a group of four top professional players created in 1922. Its members were Karigane Junichi, Segoe Kensaku, Suzuki Tamejiro and Takabe Dohei.

Its goal was to play multiple round-robin tournaments under a new playing system with the manifesto of: Time limits to be up to 32 hours per games, 16 hours per player. Players who have not finished playing before expiry of their time allocation lose the game.^[1] It was the first organisation to introduce time limits.

It also discarded the traditional handicap systems for the So-tagaisen(総互先制) system (though without komi), which is regarded as the forerunner of the modern playing system (time-limits, all even games with komi and rank promotion on clearly defined conditions).

After completing a quadruple round robin tournament (Karigane won), it disbanded in 1924 with the founding of the Nihon Kiin.

Notes

[1] Source: http://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=25019&sid=8b3c8e2a12b1253f4c1e893f94156954#p25019

The tournament book has a note on times recorded: "less than 1 minute is rounded off". Therefore it was not a sudden death; consumed times less than 0.5 min (30 seconds) were ignored. The book can be accessed through the Japanese National Diet Library's "Digitized Contents Transmission Service".