UK Team Heads for Promotion Play-Offs

The 10th round of the B-League on 25th April saw the UK playing Austria. The match was drawn after some good play on boards 1 and 2.

Des Cann wrote: Very happy. Won by 1/2 pt against Viktor Lin ranked 24th on European rating list. He invaded my right-hand side Chinese twice, which was actually reasonable as I had tenukied. Then he leant on my bottom side and went for a severe attack on my small group in between his two groups. However he overplayed his hand and my group lived, cutting of some stones and connecting to my top right corner making it big. From then on he played hard everywhere testing me. It got quite complicated, but nothing fell off. System said I'd won by 12.5, but komi had defaulted to -5.5, so the corrected score was 0.5

Daniel Hu wrote: I won by resign against Lothar Spiegel. My opponent did something weird in the Chinese that I didn’t know what to do against. My result was ok, but I spent 10 minutes checking the life and death, and still got things wrong. I didn’t seem to know what I was doing in the opening, and felt things were particularly awkward when my opponent invaded 3-3 (4-4 kick shape). Thereafter, I invaded deeply into my opponent’s area and found a ko. I didn’t think I had the ko threats, but black just defended and let me live in sente (I think he misread). Even so, somehow my position still didn’t seem great, perhaps I messed up in the centre, and I had a fighting attitude, almost losing on time with 9 moves in 20 seconds. Then I messed up a life and death in the lower right, and I thought I was going to lose. We both made mistakes in the endgame, his were probably bigger, though I don’t understand how eventually I was leading by 12.5.

Jon Diamond wrote: Not so good against Martin Unger. I lost on time, but that was partly because my click on the iPad didn’t seem to be recognised with only a couple of seconds to go. However, I had lost anyway as even if my big group survived I was about 10-15 points behind with no chance to gain this amount. I suppose it was lost in the chasing in the middle game - I thought my group was strong enough, but he managed to get enough territory in attacking fairly gently and I had no real response...

Jamie Taylor wrote: Well I had a very bad loss against Bojan Cvjetkovic. I started a fight early and it seemed to be going alright (probably better than it really should have), but then I thought I saw a way to kill his group. I spent several minutes reading it, then played it out and found my stones captured in a ladder. I tried to do something with a ladder breaker but it didn't work and wouldn't have been anywhere near enough if it had, so I resigned.

This left the team third behind Poland and Italy. A good win against Italy in the last round on 16th May would leave them in the play-off position for promotion to the A-League.

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