The legendary Tartrate played a game on KGS yesterday after 4 years of absence. The game was set up in advance and announced on many go websites so everybody on the server was in a crazy mood in anticipation of this historical game. Tartrate's opponent was Gentlerain, one of KGS top players with a rating of 9d.

I can't comment on the level of play in this game as I'm not strong enough but it was quite interesting. I don't know exactly how many people watched this game, there were 800 watchers in the game itself but also more than 500 in the clone with moderated chat so it's hard to say what the real total was since many people were probably in both. As you can imagine, the KGS admins had a hard time keeping things civilized but that's part of the fun too.

So Tartrate played White with a 0.5 komi which is interesting given his opponent. Things were getting really complicated and with both players in 30s byo-yomi, Tartrate finally lost on time. Some high dan spectators thought the game was still playable for white. Tartrate left immediately but came back a few minutes later and showed us a better variation for white that I have included with this sgf file (go to move 99) and that would have secured unconditional life for white's group.

Overall, I had a lot of fun watching this game. It wasn't just the game itself but the nostalgia about the time when Tartrate first appeared on KGS. I used to spend a lot of time on KGS back then when it was smaller and it was a lot easier to make friends and have a good time just chatting. But even with Tartrate back, it's not quite the same nowadays...

SGF file: tartrate.sgf

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