We drew our final match against Italy, which we needed to win to avoid relegation. Both Bei Ge and Jon Diamond lost this time. A poor performance all round!
So we ended up with a really consistent record this season, no wins and 4 draws from the 9 matches. Jon Diamond must be tagged as the main culprit - no wins from 6 games.
Must try harder next year...
Another poor result leaves us still in last place in the second division. This time we didn't lose, but only drew against Belgium - our third draw this season and still no win.
Andrew Simons played on Monday, but as he said "Forgot to eat beforehand, didn't concentrate, didn't read, didn't win." Really careless...
Bei Ge's opponent didn't turn up or something, so he won by default.
Jon D
Our poor run of form continues, but this time we have a really tough match against the table-topping Finns.
Vanessa again had problems with connecting to Pandanet-IGS and dropped out at the last minute, leaving Jon Diamond on top board to face Antti Törmänen (7 dan on Pandanet), who's just had a fantastic result in the World Students Oza, coming third.
38 players attended the 2013 Irish Go Congress, held in Dublin. Csaba Mero, 6d Hungary, won the main tournament, The Confucius Cup, for the second time with a perfect 5/5 score. In second place was Zebin Du, 4d China, and third was Antoine Fenech, 5d France.
Roger Daniel, 6k UK, and Mikulas Kubita, 15k Czech Republic, won all five of their games, while Thomas Shanahan won four.
After our unfortunate forfeit against the Netherlands last month (we forgot to turn up), we were up against Poland this month.
On board 1 Andrew Simons was looking forward to getting his revenge against Marek Kamiński whom he had narrowly lost to at the Polish Go Summer Camp last year (http://lsg.go.art.pl), but Marek didn't show up so he won by forfeit.
Played the night before, Des Cann
UK's Vanessa Wong was part of the European team at the 2nd SportAccord World Mind Games in Beijing. In the Women's event she lost to Choi Jeong 2p of Korea, beat Rita Pocsai 5d from Hungary and lost to Natalia Kovaleva 5d from Russia. She also played Pair Go with Jan Hora of Czechia.
Our disappointing start this season continues... so badly that we are now bottom of the League with only one draw from four matches!
We are still seeking our first win of the season after a disappointing 1-3 loss to Norway.
Despite the first appearance by Vanessa Wong on top board for our team our poor start to the season continues and we're now in the Relegation Zone for the first time.
We had another loss to the Swiss, with Bei Ge managing our solitary win by a substantial margin.
Our second match of the season was against Denmark and ended in a 2-2 draw.
On board 1 Chong Han's game soon plunged into a fight when he pushed into the centre, presumably expecting his opponent to block before connecting on the edge, but Jannik Rasmussen resisted and disconnected the groups.
Toby Manning was our representative at the Korean Prime Minister's Cup this year. On day the first day he easily defeated the Korean "ghost", followed this with by a narrow loss (9.5 points) to Thailand and managed a close victory (1.5 points) against Denmark.