News

British Go Journal No. 61. March 1984. Page 14.

MIDLAND TEAM TOURNAMENT

The Midland League was replaced, this year, by a team tournament held at Coventry on March 4th. Coventry, Leicester, Nottingham and Malvern took part. Matches were between teams of four players, and were played at full handicap. The results were:

Details of this and next year's event from Stewart Hinsley, 8 Gaveston Rd. Coundon, Coventry CV6 1GZ

LONDON OPEN

This year's London Open Tournament, the 10th, attracted 128 entrants from all over Europe and from Japan. The lightning tournament was won by Andr Moussa, from Paris. He beat fellow Parisian Pierre Colmez in the final. Andr was obviously on good form, since he also managed to tie for first place in the main tournament, with six wins out of seven. When the tie break had been done, though, he finished third behind N. Hosokawa and M. Macfadyen. It was particularly pleasing to see Mr. Hosokawa rounding off his all too brief stay in Britain with a convincing win in our biggest tournament.

Prizes were also awarded to those with 5.5 wins or better. These were - C. Jutow 7 kyu from Nantes, S. Brown 2 kyu from Oxford, and P. Ryan 15 kyu from Cheltenham.

FIRST NOTTINGHAM TOURNAMENT

from Tony Atkins

A normal quiet weekend at Nottingham University was shattered by debates, riots, bomb scares and scandals, However this was because of the planned visit of the South African Ambassador and not the Nottingham tournament being held the following day, November 12th.

34 players attended this four round tournament and played some exciting go. Manchester Club left very pleased having won four prizes: the team prize and those of winner Brian Chandler (2 dan), runner up John Smith (also 2 dan) and Chris Kirkham (1 kyu). Others last seen clutching bottles of booze (or boxes of chocolate according to taste) were: Mark Skinner (17 kyu, Notts), Hilary Norburn (11 kyu, Leicester) and Alan Thornton (2 kyu, Hemel Hempstead),

HAROLD LEE

It has come to our notice that Harold was the only vegetarian go player in London not at the October CND march. We trust that this will not happen again.

PROMOTIONS

Since our last issue, Graham Clemow has been promoted to shodan, Ian Meiklejohn to 2 dan, Gavin Grant to 2 dan and Richard Hunter to 3 dan. Congratulations to all of these.

It used to be traditional that at least one British first kyu scored 6/8 in the New Year tournament and got promoted, but this year it was broken with. It may be argued that there being only seven rounds in the tournament this year had something to do with this, but there are also suggestions at large that the current batch of British first kyus is a bit below par. Further remarks on being a sub standard kyu player will be found on pages 24 and 25.

OXFORD

An impressive 80 players attended the February event. Mr. Choi from Birmingham won the bottle of Laphraoig with wins against John Rickard, Terry Stacey and Matthew Macfadyen.

WESSEX

Attendance at the 1983 Wessex was slightly disappointing at 62, though many of the old familiar faces were there, Overall winner was Matthew Macfadyen.

Others with 4/4 were Messrs. Lee, Blockley, Sommerville and Thompson. The places in the Candidates' tournament went to Jeremy Roussak and Andrew Grant.

LONDON - JAPAN MATCH

This traditional event was held in December at the IVC in Covent Garden. The Japanese side proved too strong especially on the lower boards, and they won the match 46-41 (each person played three games). A good time was had by all and especial thanks are due to Kimberley for an amazing spread of new and exciting food,

BLACK BULL

The Leigh Sinton handicap tournament in December was preceded by a teach-in on the Saturday. The effects of snowfall over the weekend were largely offset by the effects of Marston's pedigree, and the tournament was won by Richard Granville. It is some measure of the inadequacy of standard handicaps for tournament purposes that all of the four dan players present won prizes (for winning at least three games out of four).

ASIDES FROM THE NEW YEAR:

Peter Polkinghorne, who did most of the spade work at this Year's Tournament, offers the following advice to those tournament goers who have not yet quite got the hang of it:

• On registration, turn up just when the first round is due to begin, and explain that you always thought that the first round began 20 minutes late.
• Having completed a tremendously long game in which you and your opponent went into byo-yomi, and for good measure started half an hour late, complete the post game analysis before reporting the result.
• ask the organiser i) why there are fewer people than last year; ii) why the time limit/ byo-yomi/komi are not larger or smaller; iii) whether he could not do byo- yomi for them.
• Stand beside the notice board, preferably with a time table on it, and ask when the next round is,
• If you are doing badly, and there is no hope of winning a prize, fail to attend the remaining rounds and do not tell anyone.
• Remember, the Organiser is your main enemy - he is the one who will draw you against a ridiculously strong opponent just when you were about to win a prize - so get your retaliation in first.

NEWS FROM ABROADNEWS FROM ABROAD

KISEI: Cho Chikun won again. This was Rin's third attempt at the title, and he started badly with three straight losses. Last year, however, he had won the Honinbo title after just such a start, also against Cho, so when Rin won the fourth and fifth games things were looking set for another upset. In the sixth game Rin thought he had won by 0.5 point until after the counting - he was 0.5 point behind.

MEIJIN: Cho Chikun rebuffed Otake's challenge by 4 - 1 last autumn, and the new league is just starting, Otake has started badly with two losses and one win, Best results so far are Rin (3-1), Ishida Akira (2-0) and Kobayashi Koichi (3-0).

HONINBO: The new Honinbo league is spectacular in several ways. Otake and Kato are both out of the league, and Cho Chikun has started with an amazing five straight losses. The best placed player to become challenger when we last heard was Takemiya Masaki, who has been Honinbo twice, though he has never won any of the other major titles.

OZA: Kato has started a successful defence of this title against Kobayashi Koichi by winning the first game.

GOSEI: Otake used to make a habit of being Meijin, but Cho has made that rather hard of late, so he has had to make do with lesser titles, Last autumn he hung on to the Gosei against Awaji Shuzo.

TEN GEN: Kataoka Satoshi, who won this tournament last year to gain his first title, has retained it by a margin of 3-1 against the challenge of Awaji Shuzo, a man who has been tipped as a probable title holder several times but has not yet quite got there,

SHINJIN O: The name Yoda Norimoto may not sound very familiar to most Western players, but anyone following Japanese results over the next few years is likely to see quite a lot of it. In the past two years three people have exceeded 40 wins in professional tournaments. Kobayashi Koichi did it the easy way by being in both Honinbo and Meijin leagues. The other two were Yoda - once each year and all by winning an awful lot of rounds in knock-out tournaments,

This year, Yoda won the Shinjin O (New stars) title, which is restricted to players of 7 dan or lower, but his record compares favourably with those of Ishida and Kato in the late 1960's and it looks like a matter of a few years only until he is up among the big boys. Yoda is 16.

PRAGUE: A relatively large contingent of western players attended this year's February tournament, though only Paul Fage and Matthew Macfadyen went from Britain. The tournament (which played with handicaps) was won by Tibor Pocsai, from Budapest (he's the one who played 80 games in the handicap tournament at Copenhagen). It is possible that the handicaps will be removed in future events, since the local players are getting stronger - there are now two 5 dans in Czechoslovakia.

NETHERLANDS: This year's Championship was a Swiss system tournament of six rounds with twelve players. It will come as no surprise that Ronald Schlemper won all of his games, though Gilles van Eeden coming second with 5/6 would have been harder to predict.