The UK youth team played Czechia in their fourth and final match of the 2019/20 European Youth Go Team Championship (EYGTC) over the week up to 15th February.

Alison Bexfield, team captain, writes:

On paper we were fielding a team close in strength to those of our opponents, Czechia, with the grades slightly in our favour.

Board 2 was played earlier in the week and Scott Cobbold played well to win by 7.5 points in an evenly matched game. Board 3 played on the Friday and Alexander Hsieh had another closely fought game to lose by 7.5. Since this was a game we had expected to win, this raised the tension for the final three boards. So we went into today 1-1 needing to win two games to win the match.

Alexander Timperi was the first to finish on board 4.

There was a strong entry at the Oxford Tournament. There were five players at 4d and above, and a further five at 3d; all bar one from Romania were of oriental origin. The event had changed back from May to its traditional February date, not far from Valentine's Day, with no clash as Cheshire is in March in 2020 and not February.

The venue was the same though, the former meeting house that is now Oxford Deaf & Hard of Hearing Centre, shown left, tucked behind the new Westgate Shopping Centre. This time 62 players took part, up from 57 last, but a further 14 novices played their own event in the back room during the afternoon.

For the February match, the BGA team was up against a struggling Lithuania. Promoted from the C-League for this season, their team has been struggling and, with only one draw and no wins, they are sitting bottom of the B-League. As a consequence they were reluctant to turn out to play and only one board was contested in our match, with Sandy Taylor, Des Cann and Jamie Taylor having no opponents. This win moved our team up to fourth place.

Alex Kent wrote about his game against Vladas Zaleskas: I won the sole game that was played this evening. I played a more solid opening this time and got a good position where I didn't have too much to worry about. I made some slack moves on the left side and allowed my opponent's nominally weak group some breathing room (it had a potential connection to the upper-left corner), but I still got to use it as a springboard into the centre.

Sixteen top European players qualified to the 3rd European Grand Prix Finale by earning qualifying points from the top European tournaments of 2019. They met up at Leksand in Sweden in January to battle over six rounds, starting with four-player groups, followed by a knock-out stage.

Daniel Hu's great result at the London Open meant he could take part and he had an excellent tournament. He topped Group D, beating two pros, Pavol Lisy and Tanguy Le Calvé, but losing to Stanislaw Frejlak of Poland. He then beat France's Benjamin Dréan-Guénaïzia to reach the semi-finals. This he lost to the Ukrainian pro Artem Kachanovskyi, then he lost again to Stanislaw Frejlak in the play-off to end fourth.

The Winter 2019-2020 edition of the BGJ is now available for members to read.

Rhubarb the Clown (aka Martin Solity 5k) appeared on ITV's "Midsommer Murders" on 14th January. In circus-themed episode 6 of series 20 "Send in the Clowns", Rhubarb is one of three clowns seen in the last scene of the episode.

The UK youth team played Romania in their third round match of the 2019/20 European Youth Go Team Championship (EYGTC) over the weekend of 18th and 19th January.

Alison Bexfield, team captain, writes:

Romania are a strong team so we fielded our strongest players this round. The match was split over two days, Saturday and Sunday at various times.

First on board 1 Yueran was up against a very strong player (a 6 dan). He put up a really good fight with the online score estimate suggesting he was holding his own for much of the game but in the end the result went according to grade.

On board 3 our up and coming player Scott was playing a 2 dan. Scott has improved rapidly since the autumn when he was playing at 6 kyu as his results in the London Open showed, putting him around 2 kyu. The game was exciting to watch being really close right to the end when Scott just clinched it by 3.5 points.

It was all fun and games at the Hitachi-Maidenhead Tournament. The selection of games available as prizes is shown left. Also non-playing organiser Alison kept other non-players and early finishers amused with various card and dice games. In the Go 35 players battled over three rounds with London's Peikai Xue (2d) being unbeaten to win the event. Runner up this time was Jon Diamond (2d), third was Jacob Zhang (4d) and fourth Kalle Timperi (1d). All those on two wins got the choice of one of the prize games, wine or cash as a prize, whereas those on three wins got two of the three choices. Those on three were Gokul Ramanan Subramanian (3k Cambridge), Oliver Bustos-Langton (6k Keele) and Oliver Bardsley (17k Sir John Lawes). Best school team, winning some old Go World magazines was Sir John Lawes.

26 players (and a few hangers-on) attended the second Harpenden Go Tournament (previously the Welwyn Garden City Go Tournament) on Sunday 12th January, which had an upped entry level of 1 dan. It was held again in the Harpenden Arms Public House, which still had its Christmas Lights up to honour the tournament, which wouldn't have happened on last year's March date. Afterwards some of the players enjoyed dinner at a local Italian restaurant.

Toby Manning (1d) was the overall winner, just clinching the final game of the final round against Michael Webster (1d), by a small margin, as shown above.

In the fifth match of the season, our team lost against Switzerland, dropping to sixth position in the B-League.

Andrew Simons wrote: I won my marathon game against Fabien Lips by resignation. It started with a fight from a modern double approach joseki, which got even more complicated when I thought my centre group was strong enough to make an attacking invasion to split his left side and corner. I made a little barely alive group in the gap which unsettled his and we jumped out with several one point jumps, which when he made a territorial move on the top I aimed to wedge and kill his group. He did spot that, but I got a big local profit in exchange. He surprised me by defending on the top, so I tried to surround and kill his group again; he made some not-living exchanges on the side which I answered wrongly, because it meant I couldn't kill his L group later, and he wriggled out of my bad aji net. But I attacked his other weak group and managed to sort of kill it.