Congratulations to Andrew Kay on his success at the Challengers League and his promotion to 5 dan.

Also to Felix Wang for his promotion to 4 dan.

Natasha Regan and Matt Cocke finished a very creditable 7th out of 24 in the European Pair Go Championship, held in Lyon, France, 2nd-3rd June 2012. They won 3 of their 6 games.

It was won with a flawless record by the Professional Russian Pair, Svetlana Shikshina and Alexandr Dinerchtein.

Results

The Challengers' League is the penultimate event in the Championship cycle. With Matthew Macfadyen in retirement, there is a new sense of interest in who will win take the title this year - it will definitely be a new name on the trophy.

Eight of the UK's finest players descended on the Nippon Club, London from June 1st to 4th, for the all play all event. In first place, with 6 wins from 7, was Andrew 'the Great Destroyer' Kay. There was nearly a 4 way tie-break for second place, but cream rises to the top, and Nick 'Slowhand' Krempel, played his way to a 5th win, taking outright second.

These two will now meet in the best-of-three Title Match, which will be relayed via KGS. Watch out for more detailed announcements when plans have been finalised.

This year, the BGA is making a concerted effort to attract new players to the game of go by encouraging new go clubs to form in Universities and Colleges. We are asking as many as possible of our existing go clubs to consider sponsoring a new club in their local University or College by running a “go stall” at the “Freshers’ Fair” event in October, and helping any interested students to set up a new Go club and get it established.

The BGA will support any of our clubs who are willing to take part.

Setting up a go stall at a Fresher’s Fair

Clubs taking part first need to identify a Go player in the University or College, staff or student, to take the lead in arranging for a “Go stall” at the Freshers’ Fair event. You will need some Go equipment to demonstrate the game. Your club may already have some equipment. However, the BGA can supplement this with some basic demonstration sets.

The BGA Council has decided to produce this update once a month for double digit kyu (DDK) players. If you are a DDK player, let us know what you like to hear about. And if you have any ideas about the sort of Go tournaments or events which are best for DDK players or which you would like to see in the future, please let us know. If you are a tournament organiser and you are keen to have DDK players taking part in your tournament, please let us know about that too.

Tournaments

Some tournaments have a particularly good record of attracting DDK players so you know that they are a likely place where you can find many other players around your grade. One of these is the Durham tournament, which takes place this year on Sat 16 June. Last year there were 11 DDK players at this event, ranging from 10k to 19k.

In recent tournament results, Daniel Peace 12k from Oxford won all his games at the Bracknell tournament.

This summarises the major discussions and actions from the BGA Council meeting 22nd April 2012 and preceding discussions:

• All existing Officials, as per the website, were re-appointed, with Maria Tabor replacing Jenny Radcliffe as Chair of the Tournament Committee.
• The trifold leaflets needed updating with new subscription rates and change of Membership Secretary. It was decided not to reprint them immediately as there were some suggestions for redesign and to consider this further at the next Council meeting.

This summarises the major discussions and actions from the BGA Council meeting 11th March 2012 and preceding discussions:

We won our final match of the season against Denmark 3-1, meaning we will finish in 4th or 5th place, depending on the results of the other games in the final round; better than last year when we finished 7th. Watch http://pandanet-igs.com/communities/euroteamchamps/ for final details.

In round 9 Chong Han won on board 1 against Kasper Hornbæk, getting the better side of the deal in a fighting game of many trades and winning by resignation.

Des Cann beat Thomas Heshe with a nice counter attack in which what Thomas must have thought was one of Des's weak groups, ending up killing one of Thomas'. The game continued for a while but Des defended solidly and won by resignation once it was clear all his groups were safe.

Andrew Simons got off to reasonable start in his moyo game, and although Uffe Rasmussen's invading group broke out he secured a large territory.

Andrew Kay, 4d South London, added a ninth title to his current collection by winning the Bracknell Tournament. Only one other player won all three games and that was Daniel Peace, 12k Oxford. Jil Segerman won the 13x13 with 2/2 and Jim Clare won the problem competition as the only entry. The Black Rabbits won the team prize and Paul Barnard won the caption competition. 26 players took part.

Results

The 33rd World Amateur has ended in Guangzhou in China.