This year's Mind Sports Olympiad was played online, with the Go events on OGS (online-go.com). 46 players took part in the main 19x19 tournament on the afternoon and evening of Sunday 23rd August. As well as a lot of UK players and quite a few from elsewhere in Europe, there were players spanning time zones from America to Hong Kong. With the bar at 4k the top players battled over four rounds to see who would make the final, whilst below the bar a big group of players played enjoyable games, though some of the handicaps got as high as 19!

As many as 14 of the players were juniors who had quite a late night as the fourth round games ended between 10:00 and 11:00. Junior medals went to Italy's Davide Bernardis (gold) who was also fourth over all, Samuel Barnett (silver) and on tie-break Ryan Zhang (bronze) who unfortunately lost one game because of loss of Internet. Winning all four games below the bar was Russian junior Fedor Dmitriev (10k).

The second Go event of the online 2020 Mind Sports Olympiad was the 13x13 on the evening of Friday 14th August. 23 players turned up though some Russians arrived late due to getting the time-difference wrong and one player dropped after one round.

The second Gold medal of the year also went to Italy, with Alessandro Pace winning all five games. After applying tie breaks Silver was Maciej Brzeski from Poland and Bronze was Chinese player Wei Zhou. The UK's Tim Hunt was fourth, also on four wins, just missing a medal.

Top juniors were Russia's Fedor Dmitriev and Ryan Zhang; third was Oliver Bardsley.

Results

The 2020 Mind Sports Olympiad moved online with free entry and has been attracting large numbers of players, with the barrier of travel and the cost of entry removed. Chess and Poker event entries have been in the hundreds.

The first Go event was the 9x9 on the evening of Wednesday 12th August. 42 players entered, but in the end 28 players turned up to still make it the biggest MSO 9x9 ever. Small board play is always less popular than 19x19 with some editions only attracting four entrants!

Gold medal this year went to Carlo Metta from Italy who won all five games. The Silver went to Davit Rostomashvili a strong online player from Georgia and Chinese player Wei Zhou took Bronze, both on four wins. Also with four wins, but just missing out on a medal by tie-break and non-longer counting as a junior, was Jacob Zhang (UK) in fourth.

The Summer 2020 edition of the BGJ is now available for members to read.

36 players took part in the second BGA real time online tournament, this time with a single day, three-round format. Kalle Timperi (1d) came out top, winning a £45 Amazon voucher for his efforts. Joel Barrett (4k) and Michael Kyle (3k) took second and third place, winning vouchers of £25 and £10 respectively. Vouchers were also awarded to others on three wins: Sam Barnett (7k) and Jason Jackson (18k). Prizes also went to the highest placed below-the-bar (Colin Williams) and highest placed DDK (Dan Whiteley).

Results

On Sunday 5 July, 30 young Go players gathered online for our first online training tournament for the UK Youth Go Squad, reports Alison Bexfield. Any player who had reached 20k or better was invited (that we were aware of) and it was pleasing to see how many of the players had improved over recent months since we last saw them play.

The tournament was played over three rounds during the afternoon on OGS, where we were able to have a private invitation-only group.

The fact that the strength of our youth players has increased over recent years was evidenced by the fact that 8 of our 30 players were graded 3kyu or stronger (with three of this group in the U12 age group) .

Jacob Zhang is our strongest player and won all three games to lead the top group, although a very rapidly improved Ryan Zhang, now playing at 2k, gave him a good game.

As they finished second in the Pandanet Go European Team Championship C-League, to get promotion Ireland had to beat the B-League's ninth placed team, Sweden.

Board one was played early on Sunday 14th May and Karl Irwin lost to Sweden's Charlie Åkerblom by resignation. The other four boards played on the Tuesday, 16th May, and Philippe Renaut beat Martin Li, also by resignation, to make the match one all. Matei Garcia's game ended when Tiger Hillarp lost on time in a complicated game with huge territories and dead groups, but James Hutchison struggled against Robin Nilsson, eventually resigning. This meant it was all down to the last game between Ian Davis and Anton Silfver. This was a very close and long game, but unfortunately an error in the small yose saw Ian lose a point and the game by half a point.

The meetings on OGS for youth players and parents are continuing every Sunday from 4pm to 6pm. There are junior players from 25-kyu up to 2-kyu and about half a dozen parents joining in as well. New members are very welcome, please contact Paul Smith (paul361smith at gmail.com) for details of how to join.

On 1 June some of our youth players from this group joined in the Dutch youth group on OGS organised by Dave de Vos. We won 6 out of 8 games played against the Dutch junior players (and Alexander Hsieh won a handicap game against Dave), but this wasn't a competition. The point was just mostly to play with some different players and have fun. If there are any other groups on OGS (for example any UK club groups) who we could have a joint meeting with please let Paul know.

On 7 June we started a "Supergo" match on KGS between twelve British youth players and a team of twelve youth players organised by Go teacher Li Ang in China.

Our team’s last match of the season was against Belgium. If we won then we would jump above them into fifth. A loss would move us down near, but just above, the relegation zone. Jon Diamond finished quickly and Des Cann finished slowly, being the last game of the B-League season to end. His game was a win which went with Jamie Taylor’s to make the match a draw. The team stayed to sixth (on tie-break from Switzerland) to end the league comfortably in the middle. Serbia saw off demoted Lithuania to take the top place, and Italy drew with Switzerland to get the promotion play-off place. The most important game of the evening saw the Netherlands beat Sweden, allowing the former to escape the relegation game in favour of the latter.

Andrew Simons wrote: I lost to Lucas Neirynck, returning to my bad old habit of losing on time after unnecessary complications during overtime in a game that I was leading.

The BGA held its first real time online tournament on the 2020 VE Day Bank Holiday weekend. 42 players took part in a three-round Mcmahon tournament on OGS, with one game per day. Zherui Xu (4d Cambridge) came out the eventual winner with three wins. Sandy Taylor (2d Cambridge) took second place and Mark Baoliang Zhang (1k Manchester) was third. All three received Amazon vouchers as prizes. Also picking up vouchers for three wins were Dan Whiteley (11k Birmingham) and Callum Urwin (10k No Club); Callum also took the Highest Placed Double Digit Kyu prize. Gokul Ramanan Subramanian (2k Cambridge) took the highest placed below-the-bar prize.

The intention was to run these tournaments each month whilst unable to run face-to-face tournaments.

Results