After a successful start to the season last month against Greece, our UK team played Switzerland in round 2 of the European Team Championship on Tuesday.

Switzerland are one of the toughest teams in our league, but our strongest players stepped up and we managed to secure a great 3-1 victory, including a half-point win by Des Cann on board 2.

Many of you will remember the fine work done by Gerry Mills, in taking a BGA bookstall to a large number of tournaments and on top of that providing a mail-order operation for books and sets.

Roger Huyshe is restarting this service, albeit in a smaller way as he points out that he cannot dedicate a whole room in the house to a large stock of Go books and equipment. So a mail-order service is not offered; the service is face-to-face.

He will bring the bookstall and sample boards to all tournaments that he attends. For those that plan ahead, they can ask for a specific item and find a way to manage delivery e.g. at a later tournament or via another Go player.

All profit goes to the BGA.

British Go Journal 161 is now available publicly and 165 is now available to BGA members online as well as in print.

The 8th Korean Prime Ministers Cup, organised by the Korean Amateur Baduk Association, was held in Gumi Conference Centre, in an industrial city about four hours South East of Seoul. The weather was lovely (about 22 degrees), but sadly the sun was shining outside on the UK flag being flown upside down, possibly indicating distress at the UK's likely results? The opening ceremony featured magic acts making women, flowers and birds disappear and then appear again, and also strange modern Korean dancing.

There were three games on the first day, with above the bar China, Japan, Hong Kong, USA, Finland (Juri Kuronen) and Czechia (Ondrej Silt) winning all three. Ilja Shikshin of Russia unfortunately got Hong Kong in the first round.

Though the number of attendees was down, the players at the East Midlands Tournament liked the new venue of the Thorpe Astley Community Centre. This is a new wood-clad building in a suburb to the west of Leicester, just in the shadow of Leicester Forest East motorway services. Despite the pouring rain, you could watch the dog-walkers in the surrounding playing fields through the glass wall.

The return of the bookshop was appreciated by the players, and the organiser's thanks go to Roger Huyshe. Also the players' thanks go to the organiser, Peter Fisher, for organising efficiently and getting the prize-giving ready 45 minutes earlier than planned.

The winner's prize went to Yuanbo Zhang (4d Nottingham) and the others on three wins were Lucas Meurin (3k Birmingham), Richard Leedham-Green (4k Lincoln) and Andrew Russell (4k Birmingham).

Results

Although no Go tournament took place, Roger Huyshe ran a stand with the aim of introducing some of the 500 attendees at this event in Cardiff to Go, managing to sell four beginner’s books and three basic sets as well as putting eight or nine people in touch with their nearest club and playing trial games with half a dozen. This was also the first outing of our new roller banner - available for use by anyone who needs to market Go at an event.

The most promising contact was with a couple who have Local Authority responsibility for 17 schools and are interested in setting up School Chess and Go clubs.

Also helping staff the stand were our Membership Secretary Paul Barnard, Welsh Champion Dylan Carter and, from the Cardiff Go Club, Neil Greenwood, Keiran Grayson and Club Secretary Neil Moffatt.

Report by Tony Collman for the AGA

The latest two sets of minutes are now available to be viewed by members here and here.

The Autumn London International Teams was won by the Oriental team consisting of Young Kim (5d), Yangran Zhang (4d) and Kiyohiko Tanaka (3d), from Korea, China and Japan respectively. CLGC B finished next, ahead of CLGC A, Asia, Wanstead and Twickenham. Players winning all three games were: Young Kim (5d), Mark (Baoliang) Zhang (1d), Stephen Martingale (6k) and Colin Maclennan (9k).

Results and photo link

Numbers were up on last year, likely due to Catherine's homemade lunches. As an experiment, they had a formal game review session at tiered levels, between rounds two and three, and most players chose to attend, enjoy and debate. The schedule accommodated this with the main time preserved, but byoyomi made more aggressive.

Toby Manning was again the overall winner. Unusually, no others won three games, so Chris Kirkham (3k) gained a prize for second place (over the losing finalist, Helen Harvey (1k), on a tiebreak) and Tony Pitchford (10k) won a random draw prize.

Results

The European Team Championship started on Tuesday 17th September. Our first match was against Greece.

Greece's team entered was quite a bit weaker than ours, so this was a match we really needed to win if we were to hope for promotion again to the B league after being relegated last season. Thankfully our team came through, and we got off to a great 4-0 start. The game records are available below in the 'sgf' links.

Our second match is against Switzerland on 22nd October, 8pm UK time. Please do come along and support the team if you're around - always nice to get support and the matches are high quality.