36: My Experience at the Los Angeles Open 2024 

Awesome update, I know a few players that went from Las Vegas to play in the tournament.

Congratulation on the great result. I'm glad you went to a tournament. In my opinion they are very important for go culture, because that's how you meet other players not just from your local club. It creates a community around the game and thanks to that I know lots of go players from other cities. I'm a bit surprised that you got to play so many Handicap games, usually they are avoided if possible. I wonder what pairing algorithm they used. In our tournaments we use the MacMahon system. Depending on your rank you get some starting points (E.g. a 1 dan might get 30 point, a 1 kyu 29, 2 kyu 28 etc.). Then you pair players that are closest in score. After each round you get 1 point for a win, 0 points for a loss and 0.5 for a draw (we play with 7 komi, there are usually one or two draws per tournament). Handicap is determined by the difference in MacMahon score minus one or two (usually there are no handicap games). If annyone is thinking about organizing a tournament, there is software that does all of that automatically. OpenGotha is what we use.