The Tennozan 天王山 League

Access the league here!

The first league participants.

Some years ago, I managed an online league called DOGemP or "Online Go Dojo in Portuguese", which also featured reviews, and lectures on various topics — and which was managed through this spreadsheet.

The lectures themselves were quite a bit of work for me to pump out weekly. But I was also reviewing pretty much all of the league games, and streaming mine live. All in all, slowly, as other things in my life started to demand more time, managing that online dojo became more and more infeasible. At the time, I was in an all-or-nothing mindset around the idea, so I chose to terminate it.

Now I'm restarting it. Kinda.

We're gonna have a weekly handicap league, in which I'll stream my games. And I'll try to have everyone schedule games for Wednesdays 8 pm GMT-3, this way we can socialize better. Since I'm gonna be live streaming, I can also provide comments on other players' games after I finish mine.

The league format is gonna be the top 2 players in each division get promoted, and the bottom 2, demoted. And the time settings will probably be 20 min + 20s Fischer.

Everyone is welcome, you don't need to be Brazilian or be able to speak Portuguese to join. Most Brazilians know at least a bit of English, so that helps a lot in communicating with foreigners.

Tennozan (天王山), or "heaven king mountain" was the hill or mountain the shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi used to win the decisive battle for reunifying Japan in 1582. That term can be used much like the Star Wars' "Anakin, I have the high ground" meme.

Obi-Wan's iconic "It's over, Anakin, I have the high ground".

An example of a "tennozan" in Go, from Sensei's Library. Black's 1 controls the top-right quadrant of the board from "above", pressuring the opponent at the same time.