CongressNews No. 5
Memories of Go Congresses, Part 2
The side events of the European Go Congresses create their own peculiar atmosphere. In 1988 Hamburg I attended the nonstop lightning tournament and played many games. One of them was against a Swedish 7 Kyu. The play went smoothly and quickly. At one moment I threatened to capture a nice group of stones. My opponent didn't reply to the threat so I captured them promptly. He was shocked:
"B-b-but y-y-you didn't say atari."
"Excuse me?"
"You are supposed to say atari when you play that kind of move."
I never heard about that kind of rule and was slightly suspicious.
“Well, you didn’t say atari a couple of moves ago when you put that stone in atari.”
“Ah, that atari was obvious!”
As Macfadyen’s rules of rash go say: always say atari when it’s one stone, never when it’s twenty.
(Vesa Laatikainen)
