A few simple rules ... limitless possibilities

Membership Secretary since April 2012

16 Braemar Close, Swindon SN3 1HY

April 2013

Membership Secretary for many years to April 2012 and now Honorary Auditor.

April 2013

Alison, aged 44, is a chartered accountant, currently working as Head of Audit at the BBC. She is also Vice-Chairman of her local NHS hospital Trust. She has been playing go for 25 years since discovering it at Cambridge University and is a former President of the British Go Association. She has represented the UK in the Women's World Amateur Championships and in the Women's Team event at the previous World Mind Sports Games in Beijing.

June 2012

Jonathan manages computers for the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge. His interest in Go began at university, with the discovery, in a secondhand bookshop, of Kaoru Iwamoto's introductory guide to the game. He attended the local Go club and soon got to dan level. As well as playing Go, he enjoys Ballroom and Latin American Dancing.

Jonathan is a member of the Cambridge Club, represented the UK at the WMSG 2008 in Beijing and has been BGA Secretary since 2010.

April 2013

Henry has just finished his A-levels and hopes to study medicine at University next year. Aside from llamas, Go is his greatest passion and he has been playing obsessively for two years. Recently, he set up a Go club at a local primary school.

June 2012

John encountered Go vaguely in 1969, at Cambridge in 1972 and again in 1976 and always meant to get into it seriously but never quite got round to it until 2005 when he rolled up at St Albans Go club from which they haven't yet found an excuse to chuck him out.

He's sort of crawled out of the DDK pit painfully slowly since then. He would like to reach a sensible playing level before his dotage.

Until the summer of 2013 he ran an Open-Source software company in Welwyn Garden City, founded in 1986.

John admits responsibility for the online league software which he started in 2009. Because of (or in spite of) this, he was elected to the council as Online Chairman in 2010.

4th January 2011

Anna, 32, lives in London and manages Sales and Technical Support at cloud hosting provider, ElasticHosts. At University she studied AI and her final year project was about a computer program that solved life and death problems.

Anna has been playing Go for over 20 years, having first learnt the game at Furze Platt School in Maidenhead. She was UK under 16's champion in 1996 and since then has been active in the Go community, competing in and organising many tournaments, including the European Pair Go Championship in 2005, and generally promoting Go at every opportunity.

Anna was a member of the British Go Association Council from 2003 to 2007, and she is involved in organising the annual Mind Sports Olympiad, which will be held in London in August 2012.

June 2012

Helen, 42, is a Management Information Analyst at Royal Bank of Scotland, Manchester. She has been playing Go for 19 years. She initially learnt from her husband, Martin, although she is now stronger than him. She regularly attends UK & European tournaments, and has represented the UK twice in Japan, once in Romania and also at the WMSG 2008 in Beijing. She is married with no children.

October 2008

Kirsty, 54, is a teacher from near Leamington Spa. She has been playing Go for many years and has represented the UK both at the World Amateur Women's Championship, the International Amateur Pair Go Championship and the WMSG 2008 in Beijing. Her partner in the latter is her husband Matthew Macfadyen. She has two daughters.

October 2008

John, 56, is an Environmental Consultant from Devizes in Wiltshire. John has been playing go for nearly 40 years. He learned to play the game while at school in Newcastle Upon Tyne and then at Oxford University. Currently he plays at the Bath Go Club. His most significant results have been to twice qualify for the penultimate stage of the British Go Championship. In the 1980s he reached the semi-final of the World Computer Go Championship. He is married with two children and represented the UK at the WMSG 2008 in Beijing.

October 2008

I first encountered Go in my gap year at work where I was writing bits of the operating system for the long defunct mainframe computer company English Electric-Leo-Marconi. I was struck by the novelty of the game and immediately went to the limit of my teenage budget and constructed a board drilled with 361 pinholes with coloured drawing pins for stones.

With less than a dozen games of Go under my belt I took up Bridge instead at University but returned to Go a few years later. I founded the Corby Go Club, moved to Manchester, where I became the secretary and reached a weak 1-kyu grade. Marriage, children and other hobbies intervened and although I occasionally looked at Go books, that was it for some 30 years.

I had always valued in Go both the friendly community and the mental challenge from the huge range of strategic concepts. So come retirement from a varied life in I.T., I thought it would it would be fun to make one more push – from my supposed 1 kyu level and reach shodan. Big shock. Even after getting back into practice, I was just 5 kyu. In my absence, somebody had moved the goalposts, as seems quite clear from anecdotes, player graphs and Toby Manning’s earlier BGJ article “Why am I getting weaker?”

It has also been a surprise – after my 30-year gap – to find so many of the faces unchanged and the BGA membership, at its lowest level since records began. This despite the evidence from the website of a huge amount of effort and professionalism from those running the BGA. No doubt we have to blame the internet and other competition for people’s time, but I’ll see what I can contribute on this front.

I have found tournaments a joy, particularly the two-day ones, which allow more time for socialising and local exploring. I recently took over the small Shropshire tournament and hope to quietly develop that as an attraction for kyu players and Stacey points.

April 2013

It was while working for Plessey Telecommunications in the 'maths hut' at Taplow Court near Maidenhead in the early 70's, that I first came across the game of Go. A small group of us used to meet regularly at lunchtimes for 13x13 games and I rapidly became enthused by everything about Go including the elegance of the playing material. Within a year I had constructed my first wooden Go board.

On moving to London in the mid 70's, I became a regular at the London Go Centre in Belsize park run by Stuart Dowsey. A lot of people used to play there on a Saturday afternoon. On a sunny day when the club doors were open, as you approached the building, you could hear an intriguing sound, a bit like gravel being tumbled about. It gives an idea of how many players there were rattling glass stones in their bowls! After attending for about three weeks he said to me - now is the time to join the BGA!

Probably my first involvement in organising tournaments was during the time of the Hammersmith Go Club (mid 80's), where for a while we had a monthly tournament. I made a draw display system for mounting cards into wooden runners. Matthew Macfadyen later turned this into a really nice wooden display system for the London Open, where for many years at the Highbury Roundhouse, I did the draw using specially printed cards.

I then heard that there was a program for doing the pairing, got hold of it and ran the draw for the London Open on a portable computer borrowed from my workplace. It worked fine, but the next year after trying to edit the draw because the pairing was unacceptable, the program crashed and we could not recover the draw. We worked like mad to transfer the draw to cards and got the tournament underway again without being lynched! I vowed to produce a decent program - and GoDraw started life in the late 80's.

I am now developing the next generation of GoDraw. I am also intent on developing a sound model for understanding the behaviour of our rating and pairing systems.

March 2011

Matthew learned to play Go in about 1965 and first became British Go Champion in 1978. He was Champion for a total of 25 years and his European rating confirms he is European 6 dan.

After he became Champion in 1978, he defended the championship against several challengers until he was defeated by Terry Stacey in 1985. He failed to regain it in his challenge against Stacey in 1986. In 1987 Stacey lost the championship to Piers Shepperson.

In 1988 Matthew regained the title by defeating Piers Shepperson. He then again defended the championship against several challengers until 1993, when he was defeated by Shutai Zhang, who had trained in China as a professional Go player. Matthew failed to regain the title from Zhang the next three years. In 1997 Zhang returned to his native China, and Macfadyen was then able once more to regain the title. He has successfully defended it since then, losing only two games in the subsequent eight championship matches. He was unable to beat Bei Ge when he competed in 2006 and 2007, but since then regained his hold on the title until he retired in 2012.

He became European Champion in 1980 and a subsequent three times, the final one in 1989. He has had seven appearances in the World Amateur, best placed 5th in 1992. He partners his wife Kirsty at Pair Go and they have finished second in the European Pair Go twice.

Matthew has two grown up daughters and lives in Barford near to Leamington Spa. He works as an electrician when not playing Go.

January 2011, updated September 2012

Toby learned the rules of Go when he was a teenager in the 1960’s, but it was when he went to Cambridge in 1971 that he first really concentrated on the game. During his three years at University he got to be 1 kyu, and was firstly secretary then President of the University Go Society. He organised the first Cambridge Go Tournament (subsequently called the Trigantius).

His career then took him to Bristol, London, Leamington and Leicester, and in all places he was a keen member of the local club. He helped arrange each Club’s tournaments – the Wessex, London Open, Warwick and Leicester – and has organised three British Congresses as well as many Three Peaks Tournaments.

He got to be 3 dan in 1994, when he won his first tournament (the Three Peaks) although recently he has been playing at 2 dan; in 2002 he won the Irish Open. He has also won tournaments in Cornwall and Cheshire.

He was a Council member from 1976 to 1979 when he was elected President following Brian Castledine’s death, serving for 4 years. He rejoined Council in 2008, during which year he was non-playing captain for the UK Go team at the First World Mind Sports Games in Beijing.

He is married to (non go-playing) Felicity, with no children.

17 February 2010

Martha, 23, is studying for a PhD in History at Edinburgh University. She first learned Go from Matt Crosby at the age of 19, and has played with varying degrees of dedication since.

She represented the UK at the second World Mind Sports Games.

August 2012

Sue, 53, is now semi-retired from social work and lives in Arundel in Sussex, where she runs the local Go club. She used to be active on the London Go scene, before moving south. She has represented the UK five times at the world level in both Women's and Pair Go Championships and also at the WMSG 2008 in Beijing. She hopes to spend more time in her allotment and studying Go.

October 2008

Alex, 45, is a corporate financier living in London. He learnt to play Go at Oxford University and has played regularly since. Alex served as a former President of the Brtish Go Association for nearly 8 years and on Council for more than 11 years.

He represented the UK at the World Amateur Championship in 2004, has won several UK tournaments, including the Wessex tournament 3 times, and has often taken part in the penultimate stage of the British Go Championship over the years. He is married with a stepson.

October 2008

Simon, 40, learnt to play go as a child in the late 1970s. He became very active again in the 1990s playing at the Newcastle, Teesside, and Bristol clubs. He was also a regular on the UK tournament scene, with his best successes coming in the late 1990s. He is married with 2 boys. He currently plays at the Bristol (HP) club, and the occasional tournament.

October 2008

Paul, 50, lives in Cambridge. He works as a software developer at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge. He learned to play Go when he was 9 years old from a book by the games collector R C Bell. He later started a Go club in his school and they competed in the British Schools Championship in 1980.

He was promoted to 1-dan in 1993 and 2-dan in 1996. In the same year he played on board 2 for the UK team at the European Teams Championship in Zlin. He was the British Small Board Go champion in 2008.

Paul helps to organise the Cambridge Junior Chess & Go Club which has now been running for 18 years, and also a Go club in Milton Primary School. His wife and three children all play Go and at the Oxford Go tournament this year the whole family for the first time all played in the same event.

He represented the UK at the second World Mind Sports Games and was a Council member from 2011 to 2013.

August 2012, revised April 2013

Paul, 52, learnt to play Go while at school. His principal mentor was Francis Roads, President of the British Go Association at the time, and he progressed to a low kyu rank before going to university. Lack of opportunity and family responsibilities meant that he didn't play very often for many years but he was attracted back into the game at around the time that his daughter Maria took an interest in the game.

He became an amateur dan player at the end of 2006 and now plays regularly at clubs, tournaments and online. Paul lives in Hildenborough, Kent and works as a business analyst specialising in Investment Banking. His interests include running and winter mountaineering. He is also Chairman of Sevenoaks Athletic Club and represented us at the previous WMSG in Beijing.

June 2012