3rd World Othello Championship
Rome. Hilton Hotel. October 28-30 1979
The third edition of the World Othello Championship was the first one held in Europe, hosted in Rome, Italy in October 1979.
The organisers were a bit dissapointed that only eight players attended when national tournaments had been held in 16 different countries. Among the eight national representatives only Japan's Hiroshi Inoue, the 1977 world champion, and British champion Alan Woch had played in a previous edition. All the other competitors were making their debut at a WOC including three players representing countries that had not been involved in the previous editions (Belgium, France and Germany).
In the early days of the WOC the tournament format and rules would often change from year to year as there was no established standard but the organisers did tend to learn from past mistakes and so each edition would be a sllght improvement on the previous one. For the 1979 WOC it was decided to once again divide the competitors into groups but at least this time they would play a double round-robin in two groups of four, which meant every player would take part in at least 6 games (a vast improvement on the 2 games in New York). They also used total wins as the first criteria to rank players rather than disc total as had been done in the past (disc total was however used as tie-breaker).
The young Italian champion Vincenzo Peccerillo and Alan Woch of Great Britain both qualified for the semi-finals from Group A. In Group B, Hiroshi Inoue won all his games as could be expected, followed by the US champion Jonathan Cerf whose only losses in the round-robin came from the Japanese champion. Inoue went on to defeat Alan Woch in two straight games in the first semi-final and Cerf did the same against Peccerillo in the other semi-final.
The finals were to be played behind closed doors, so there was no information about what was going on in the games until they were finished. Hiroshi Inoue would face Jonathan Cerf in a best-of-three final, another Japan-USA showdown as in the previous year, with the same result, the Japanese champion winning in two straight games to become the first player to win two world titles.
Semi-final 1st game. Hiroshi Inoue (left) and Alan Woch (right) |
B: Inoue - 41 W: Cerf - 23 |
Jonathan Cerf, USA, Jim Becker of Anjar Co. and Hiroshi Inoue, Japan. |
W: Cerf - 14 B: Inoue - 50 |