From: Larry Kaufman <lkaufman <at> WIZARD <dot> NET>
Date: 4 jun 2000
Subject: Re: Shogi World Championship-Tournament Time Table

At 02:32 PM 6/4/00 -0400, you wrote:
>Dear Larry,
>Yes, we like to see if there were any better format for the tournament on the
>exactly same condition.
>The main reasons why the tournament set prizes for B and C classes was to
>encourage weaker players to participate the tournament and give a chance
to win
>money and play seriously even if they are classified to B and C.
>If there is not in Western players to intentionally lose games to go down to
>lower level than their real level, don't worry about it. There is no one in
>Japanese to do such embarrassment.

     I don't know of any player (Western or Japanese) who lost on purpose.
I don't even suspect anyone.  But I also can't say that it didn't happen.
No one can.
     The real problem is not players losing on purpose, but simply that
players know that they might be better off to lose, and so (perhaps
subconsciously) they don't try their hardest.  This can never be detected;
even the player himself might not know it!  I think it is not nice to put a
person in a position where winning will probably cost him all chances for a
big prize.
     That is why I think that if you want to award prizes to the weaker
players, they should be based on the player's rank.  You have said that you
didn't want to consider rank in the tournament pairings; but perhaps you
would consider it for prize purposes.  Then you wouldn't need these
separate sections, and the prizes would go to genuinely weaker players, not
to strong 4 Dans who happened to get relegated to "B" class by bad luck (or
by not trying hard).  But if you still want the proposals to specify A,B,
and C groups based on prelim results, I'll conform to your requirement.

>Best Regards,
>Shigeki Masui


     Larry