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Elite Mind Games Day 2 report

In today’s IMSA Elite Mind Games team competitions for both men and women, China drew North America, Korea drew Europe, and Taipei drew Japan.  China and Korea easily defeated their opponents to win 4-0; the suspense was with the closely matched games between Taipei and Japan.  For men, the top two Taiwanese players Wang Yuan-Jyun and Chen Shih-Yuan defeated Japan’s new stars Shibano Toramaru and Mutsuura Yuta.  For women, much attention was focused on the match between Joanne Missingham (Hei Jia-Jia) and the multiple title winner Fujisawa Rina (granddaughter of Fujisawa Shuko).  The game lasted over five hours, with Rina finally prevailing over the seemingly rusty Joanne.  The other game featured two shodans, the 15-year old Yang Tzu-Hsuan and the 17-year old Nyu Eiko, both having reached major title challenges this year in their countries.  

Eiko, daughter of multi-time world xiangqi champion Zhao Guorong and Go 5p Niu Lili who is famous for have written Go Seigen’s books for the past 20+ years, calmly won over Tzu-Hsuan in their first of many anticipated matches to come. For readers who are not familiar with the IMSA Elite Mind Games, this event is a replacement of the previous SportAccord World Mind Games held from 2011 to 2014.  A unique feature of these events is their strong involvement of Western players.  Not only is the prize fund spread out to all players, the format of play, which does not use simple knock-outs, also allows the Western players to play many games with the top pros from Asia, thus allowing valuable training experience for the former.  In today’s IMSA Executive Meeting, it was announced that IEMG will be continued for at least another two years.  In addition, new events are being developed, aiming to hopefully reach three IMSA events per year by 2019. -   Thomas Hsiang; photo: Mingjiu Jiang (left) vs. Ke Jie