2nd Place in the 2026 Brazil Open

The 2nd place trophy of the 2026 Brazil Open, alongside some souvenirs I got from my stay in South Korea. Congrats to Alexandre Amaro on his win!

The 2026 Brazil Open happened as a congress at the beginning of September, and somehow I managed to place second on it, missing first place by just a bit.

During the regular tournament, I managed to win against Alexandre Amaro 7-8d Fox, but unfortunately lost to 94-year-old Uyama Hissao right after. That led me and Alexandre to a highly improbable tie on SOS and SOSOS!

The players I matched up against. (I was probably registered as a 5d because I hadn't played in a tournament in Brazil in a long while.)

Since the tournament had no direct confrontation tiebreaker rule, we had to play a blitz game of 10 min + 3x10s byo-yomi to decide it all. The clock we were using did have sound but it didn't pronounce the countdown, so tracking the 10s was really difficult. And 10s on a real board is much less than 10s on a computer, since we have to take the stones, place them and then tap the clock.

The extremely unlikely SOS/SOSOS tie which led to the blitz tiebreaker.

Towards the beginning of the endgame, I thought I was losing, due to having many stones captured, but I was actually winning. Nonetheless, I failed on my time management and lost on time. It was a bummer, but still surprising given that I rarely play quick games — I almost always practice with long time settings —, and Alexandre usually practices with quick games himself.

The final standings.

My game against Uyama had me in a joseki which was very easy for him to play, but extremely difficult for me. And all that after getting exhausted by difficult games against Alexandre Amaro and Hiroaki Okawa.

Also, Uyama keeps himself sharp at such an advanced age still. According to Alexandre Amaro, on their 4 most recent games against each other, Uyama managed to average 7.5d Fox, an estimate given by the AI platform Zhangqi. As a comparison, my first game against Alexandre had us hovering around 7.5d Fox, and our blitz tiebreaker hovered around 6.5d.

At the time of writing, I hop between 6-7d Fox, and so managing to beat Alexandre, who has been between 7-8d for many years already and a multiple times Brazilian champion, was very unexpected to everybody, including me.

Our first game had me (White) in a tough position after the double-hane of 75 on the bottom. But it also got him too comfortable, and his moves might have offered me some slack. The profits from attacking his two center groups and invading the top-left corner settled me in the lead for quite a while, according to AI. Despite us both thinking Black was winning, somehow I edged it out by 3.5 in the end.

Here's the blitz tiebreaker — I played as White:

As I mentioned on my One Year in Asia Studying Go article, I feel disappointed at myself that my overall improvement in the past year or so wasn't as great as I expected or wanted it to be. However, placing so high during this year's Brazil Open is a nice silver lining. It is unfortunate I didn't manage to get first place — to be frank, after my first win against Alexandre, everything felt as if it were starting to go against me, with me being tired, the improbable SOS + SOSOS tie, getting unlucky with a joseki, etc. —, but it was a nice experience nonetheless.

This year, I've been solving 10+ tsumegos and playing at least one game every day. Treating Go just like gym work helps with maintaining good shape, and it creates a habit, which is much easier to manage in the long run, since we don't have to spend as much mental effort on it.