Norwegians Freeze Us Out

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. However, the match was much closer than the result shows.

This was the first game this season that Jon Diamond took the top board and he was facing a tough opponent in Jie Lin Xia 5d. Despite managing to save his weak group after playing tenuki several times, he didn't have enough points and had to resign after some stones got cut off in the yose.

Andrew Simons had a comfortable lead against Øystein Vestgården after making a decisive cut to capture some stones and was playing to simply seal the win, but then embarked on a crazy adventure which resulted in a bad trade which made the game close again. Plagued by network lag throughout the game, he lagged out and lost on time as they were filling dame but had actually managed to lose by a half point anyway as he had overlooked the final ko.

Des Cann provided the sole win of the evening with an 8.5 points victory over Sverre Haga. He killed a group in the opening but due to bad aji on the outside got squeezed and still had a lot of work to do in dealing with his opponent's moyo, which he eventually managed to live inside.

Newly promoted to become Britain's 200th dan player, Martha McGill was also frustrated by the lag/client of IGS, losing about 15 minutes of her time. A decisive moment came when she played a move that was sente to kill a group, her opponent Tomas Hjartnes played elsewhere and instead of killing the group she answered the tenuki and then he came back to live. In the end she also lost by half a point.

Hopefully we have better luck next time!

If only komi had been one point less...

Season's details are here