Registration is now open for the 2020 US Tak Open. This is the major biennial tournament run by the USTA. The 2020 edition will be hosted online at playtak.com and run from 28 November to 20 December. Registration closes on Friday, 27 November at 9pm PST. This event is open to all members of the Association.
The first place prize (pictured below) is a set of Black Granite and White Marble stone pieces with ebony and maple capstones made by Patrick Bailey of IronwoodCarolina. The second place prize is Black Palm and Red Oak pieces from the same maker. Both of these sets have enough pieces to play 6×6 tak. The third place prize is metal Wolf and Hawk capstones.
The format for this tournament is the Nohat system. This is a modification of the Swiss system that has been optimized for online play, invented by tak player NohatCoder. The important feature is that each round has multiple matches with all the pairings created at once, which allows much greater flexibility in scheduling matches. For this particular tournament there will be three rounds: the first round will last 10 days (Saturday to the following Sunday) and each player will play four matches, the second round will last one week with two matches, and the final round will last one week with a single match. All matches will consist of two 6×6 games with a time control of 10 minutes + 15 seconds per move.
Any ties for first, second, or third place will be broken by playing pairs of blitz games until one player wins until one player comes out on top. If more than two players are tied then a double round robin will be played between tied players. The time control for all tiebreak games is 3 minutes + 5 seconds per move.
If you have any questions, please contact me on the tak Discord server (I’m @archvenison).