Win and Continue

Win And Continue is a form of go where a series of games is played, with the winner retaining their place and being challenged by a new opponent.

The most popular use of this is in the win and continue team tournament format, where teams compete to be the last team standing, but the format is also suitable for individual play.

The old Kisei tournament format used this format. Before the institution of leagues, separate knockout tournaments were held for each dan rank and the dan winners then played a win and continue ladder, where the first game was played by the two lowest ranked players, in order to determine the challenger for the title.

This format used to be called paramasu in Japanese. The ethymology of this word is unclear. There is a suggestion it has something to do with the word Paramus ^[1].

Kitani Minoru famously managed to win 10 matches in a row from 1934 onwards in a newspaper sponsored win and continue tournament labeled "Who's the strongest player in Japan?" (after 10 matches, the series was stopped for lack of opponents)

External links

• See also 'stepladder' on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tournament

[1] John F. Do you have verification that paramus is an actual word and used in such a context in English? If it is, I suspect it should be Paramus, a name. I simply call it a ladder tournament, or dan ladder in the case of the old Kisei.

Bob McGuigan: I've never seen this word used except in the old Kisei tournament where it was spelled in katakana: パラマス, which would be paramasu in romaji. I have no reason to believe the Japanese word came from English; for all I know it might have come from French, something like paramasse, but I can't find that in any of my French dictionaries. There was a discussion of the etymology of paramasu on the page English Go Terms/Discussion and a suggesation there that it might have come from bowling. This bowling tournament formats web page describes stepladder format for tournaments, which is the paramasu format, but doesn't use the word.

John F. Bob, the suggestion it is a bowling term came from me, though I got it from a Japanese lady I know whose hobby is etymology. She spent a lot of time on this on my behalf in Japanese libraries, but found it only in one dictionary, though with no guide as to the original English, Trying to chase down the bowling connection myself, I was told once that the US town of Paramus was once famous (maybe only locally) for a very long shopping mall, and shoppers went up it like a ladder. I have long since concluded that something freakish happened, such as a Japanese bowler met an American bowler from Paramus who told him the word, perhaps in jest, and it stuck. Then along came a go player to the bowling alley and... Freakish, but actually no different from calling a sponge cake kasutera.