Ian Davis

Although I play a lot of Go on KGS, I also play at my local club sometimes.

I learnt to play at Durham University, gave up for a few years then took up the game on arriving in Cambridge, where I actually improved pretty dramatically. These days I pretty much just stagnate.My tournament playing history is viewable here.

• American Sandan (3.38446) after US Open 2009
• Represented Ireland in Japan (WAGC) 2008.
• Shodan after British Open 2007.
• Nidan after 2nd World Mind Sports Games, 2012.
• Represented Ireland in Korea (KPMC) in 2006 and 2010 (25th place).
• Irish Champion in 2007, 2009 and 2010.

People I have learnt from :: Guojuan, JennieShen, Solaris , Tictactoe RIP AllanScarff who first delivered some strategy to me

Bad software I have written, see my subpage Ire (even the name is bad)

Online Go

• Ran the first online tournament for the BGA in 2004 and 2005.
• Responsible for a Texas - Ireland match
• Organised Irish 9x9 Championship events on DGS (in 2006?)
• Two Irish Online Championships in 2007 and 2008.
• In 2009 I created an Irish Interprovincial Team Competition, which ran for 3 years, it has been restarted since.
• In 2014 I started an Irish Correspondence Go Championship. This is still running.
• Admin for quite a long time on the KGS server until 2015.

Top Blogs

There are not many that I have found worthy of regular attention, but I regularly check the following

• http://gogameguru.com/ A nice blog attached to a shop in Australia
• http://rfg.jeudego.org/ Which covers French Go. I actually joined their translation team recently.
• http://guojuan5p.blogspot.com/ Light on Go, but usually interesting
• http://gooften.net/ from the only Finnish player to turn pro.
• http://desprego.ro/ a nice blog on the Romanian Go Scene
• https://massgoblog.wordpress.com (was it real?)

Irish Go

In 2007 I organised the first real tournament in Belfast with Catalin Taranu as guest pro. The tournament was repeated in 2008, 2009, 2010, and in 2011. I was on the IGA committee for about 8 years, including a reign as President of the IGA for 3 years. Now, as an emigre, I don't do much at all apart from the Correspondence Championship and the Newsletter. Recently I created an unblog which I plan to use to document Irish Go a little more. It has reached the stage where it is reasonably complete enough to be worth reading.

Other things

• Ratings: One of my pet projects was tracking the evolution of rating distributions in various european countries, but I still don't have a good approach for this. Dave de Vos made a study of rating variations in 2017/2018 which made me lose interest. :)
• I am part of Das Team EGN, an organisation which few will have heard of.
• I occasionally submit articles to the AGA-EJournal, particularly as the RFG reminded me that I still have an account there.
• A nice book on AI by a chess player (Kieran Greer) I knew - although I don't think I said more than hello to him. That's kind of a painful revelation for me since we played on the same team occasionally.

Poor Quality Translations

I have translated GO-ul in Competitii This is a book which you are unlikely to have heard of. It was by the Romanian player Radu Baciu. I am actually quite proud of translating this work, if you're starting Go you might enjoy reading it. I have also translated a booklet by Maitre Lim which is called Note sur des parties commentées.

magic tools

• Characters-to-Unicode
• GenerateDiagramFromSGF
• Old crufty software I made at WingsSGFPlayer.
• GoWrite simply the best program to make diagrams with
• not a tool, but an ethical database from Albert Brouwer

morbid

It is morbid, but I keep the list here to remind me. Players I have known (spoken to) who have died: Alain Borrell, Tony Goddard, Brian Gallagher, John Hall, Allan Scarff, Brian Timmins, (T)Mark Hall, David Ward, Clive Hendrie, Andrew Grant, Brian Dackombe, Xinyi Lu, Gerry Mills, Dave Strowgler, Jean Hossenlopp,