UK Beat Croatia

It looked like the UK had beaten Croatia 4-0 in their fourth round fixture, but it ended up 3-1 moving the UK back near the top of the B-League.

Andrew Simons wrote: I stood in for Bruno against Zoran Mutabžija (who was European Champion many decades ago but playing at 2d now) and won by a comfy 27.5 in the end, although there were a few nervous moments. He started with a diagonal opening and in a pincer counter-pincer running fight I spent a long time reading out a press expecting him to push and cut but he just crawled on the third line! Then he made some bizarre attach and crosscut sacrificing his pincer group and I got thick but then played two perhaps slow moves and he developed quickly on the rest of the board. Peeved that he didn't defend his top right corner I attacked it but it connected out on the first line weakening my thickness, so I should have just left it unplayed as, after I returned to answer his approach, he nicely hassled my thickness and it ended up squirming for connection. I managed to recover somewhat and cut off two stones with some peepy tesujis to grow my right side which I then solidified into solid points in exchange for him making a huge double wing moyo from his lower left shimari. I was a bit nervous now and misread a way in so tenukied to cap his shimari and luckily he quickly ignored it (I was in byo-yomi by now, he hadn't used much time) and then didn't try to kill me, so I managed to live quite comfortably inside his moyo and from then on it was an easy endgame (with a cute tombstone tesuji he missed to capture a few stones).

Jamie Taylor wrote of his game against Stjepan Meštrovic: I tried a new strategy of thinking things through carefully and not trying to start fights everywhere and it worked really well. We played a very calm game and my opponent just seemed to make a few more misjudgements than me. He played what seemed to me to be a fantastically clever move in the endgame and I was sure I had lost, and the server said I won by 10.5. However we afterwards discovered the komi was set wrong and I had actually lost by 1.5.

Toby Manning wrote: In the end an easy win against Daniel Zrno. We played a relatively calm opening – we each had large moyos. But he tried too hard to invade mine and ended up with three weak groups – I played very calmly, just making sure that I did not die and waited for the inevitable... I killed his corner invasion (making me infinitely strong) and went after the next group. He played very slowly (he was in byoyomi by about move 120, while I had used 20 minutes), then made a small blunder and resigned as his second weak group bit the dust.

Chris Bryant wrote about his game against Mladen Smud: My game was also an easy win. Similar to Toby's, in my game we both developed a moyo, and he went for deep invasions while I chose just to reduce. He played a little too quickly in a sequence while trying to break into my moyo and lost some important stones, but then I got a bit careless and fell asleep thinking I was a good ~40-50 points ahead and let him get a ko, oops! But I was enough ahead that I could just throw away a corner and still win the game quite comfortably. Won by 10.5 in the end.

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