The 2017 British Youth Go Championship (BYGC) returned to King Edward VI School in Aston, Birmingham, thanks to Andrew Russell and the support of the headmaster there. It attracted a big crowd of young players, in fact 46 competitors, aged from 7 to 18.

Thanks to a large number of oriental players currently living in the UK, there were several dan-graded players, most of whom not being British played in an Open group for cash prizes. Also thanks to a new club at Harpenden Academy (who are shown celebrating their win as best primary school) and a good crop of new players from Edinburgh, Cheadle Hulme and Letchworth there was a large group between 30 and 40 kyu in strength. Some of the games they played were on 13x13.

The third round of the B-League on 14th November saw the UK playing Turkey. Unfortunately the captain forget the time difference and so there was a panic to gather the players in time for a 19:00 start. In the end Bruno Poltronieri was not back in time to play, so the team shuffled up and Jon Diamond played board 4.

The match was bagged with wins on all four boards, leaving them with 12 straight board wins for the season so far.

Daniel Hu wrote: I won by 6.5 against Denis Karadaban. I played pretty slow, somewhat tired. I started with an AlphaGo Master opening, influenced by Deepzengo vs Fujisawa Rina, and my result seemed good. The game was pretty much endgame very early, and we probably both made large mistakes simply because there were so many options (at least I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing). I thought for a while to check if his upper right group was killable, but decided it probably wasn’t.

I am sure that you will be as shocked as I am to hear that Roger Huyshe, President of the BGA, died on Sunday, Nov 12.

Apparently he was cycling in Derbyshire when he collapsed - we do not think it was a traffic accident - and although the air ambulance was called, they could not save him.

The coroner has requested a post-mortem, so it may be some time before funeral arrangements can be made, but I will let you know as soon as I have more information.

Toby Manning

+++ Update as below +++

Please see here for the funeral details which have now been announced.

On Saturday 11th November 2017, the UK youth team played their opening match, against one of their hardest adversaries, Germany. We lost by 4 boards to 1. This was in the first round of the new season of the European Youth Go Team Championship 2017/18 (EYGTC). Please follow that link for names of the complete UK youth team squad.

  Post-match comments (see below for comments prior to the games): 

The UK Youth Go Team played Germany in the first round of the European Youth Go Team Championship yesterday (11 November). Due to a strong performance in the previous season, the UK were seeded into the top half of the draw, so this first match was always going to be tough.

We were outranked by at least 5 grades on boards 1, 3 and 5. Although our players - Tom Bradbury, Josh Gorman and Alexander Hsieh - fought hard, these 3 games ended as predicted with losses.

The first edition of a new monthly newsletter, Youth Go News, has been produced by the BGA and is available in the Junior section of the website as a PDF file. Please print or pass on electronically to any juniors who might not be on the BGA youth mailing list.

Toby Manning (1d Leicester) won this year's Three Peaks Tournament. Held, as last year, at the Wheatsheaf in the centre of Ingleton in Yorkshire, the two-day event attracted 28 players, a couple down on 2016.

Toby's only loss was to Eetu Erkkila (1d) from Helsinki. Eetu had lost to Matt Reid (1k Cambridge) and so ended second on SOS tie-break. Matt was third with three wins and a noteworthy fourth was James Richards (3k Edinburgh) whose only loss was to Toby in the last round.

Others winning four out of five were Ai Guan (7k) from Lancaster and Alan Stokes (9k) from Manchester. Despite no longer being DDKs, Alan increased his lead in the DDK Grand Prix and Tom Bradbury (5k Cheadle Hulme) moved up to second in both the DDK Grand Prix and Youth Grand Prix.

Results

The Autumn 2017 edition of the BGJ is now available for members to read. Sorry, only the cover was there until 2nd November!

The winner of the 33-player Wessex Tournament was Czech player Bronislav Snidal (3d). He beat the previous winner, Alex Kent, in the final. He is pictured on the left receiving the Wessex Trophy and a cash prize.

The only other player taking part at St Marks Community Centre in Bath who won all three games, a trophy and cash prize was Scott Griffiths (6k) from Bristol.

Results

The UK team won again in the European Teams to stay top of the B-League (equal with Germany). They beat Switzerland by four games to nil.

Andrew Simons wrote:

I was playing John Walch 4d again, who always gives me a tough game. As we are both slow players who struggle in overtime, my plan was to play faster than him, but that plan soon evaporated! We did a mini-Chinese plus not-avalanche opening that was popular in pro games a few years ago, but quickly went into uncharted territory and I spent a lot of time and ended up loosely connecting on top and capturing a stone in a ladder whilst he got some big territory with bad aji, seemed so-so.

After his double approach I tried out a 2nd line hanging connection pros like that's supposed to give my group more eyeshape (spoiler alert, it died).

The Northern Go Tournament was honoured to host Romanian-born professional Go player Catalin Taranu (5p). He commented on some of the games, gave a talk at lunchtime, and handed out the prizes. He stayed over to attend a meal and on the following day taught at a workshop in Stockport.

Unfortunately the organiser, Chris Kirkham, committed the first blunder of the day, messing up the registration and therefore starting an hour late! Not making blunders was the overall winner, Eetu Erkkila (1d) from Finland. He beat Yangran Zhang (3d) from Manchester in the final round.

Also winning prizes for winning all their three games were Andrew Russell (4k) from Birmingham, Adrian Abrahams (7k) from Lancaster, Brent Cutts (8k) from Nottingham and Amy Upton (22k) from Cheadle Hulme School. 42 players took part.

As in 2016, Cheadle Hulme School provided an excellent venue for which the organiser was very thankful.

Results