MSO 19x19 Ends with Exciting Midnight Final

This year's Mind Sports Olympiad was played online, with the Go events on OGS (online-go.com). 46 players took part in the main 19x19 tournament on the afternoon and evening of Sunday 23rd August. As well as a lot of UK players and quite a few from elsewhere in Europe, there were players spanning time zones from America to Hong Kong. With the bar at 4k the top players battled over four rounds to see who would make the final, whilst below the bar a big group of players played enjoyable games, though some of the handicaps got as high as 19!

As many as 14 of the players were juniors who had quite a late night as the fourth round games ended between 10:00 and 11:00. Junior medals went to Italy's Davide Bernardis (gold) who was also fourth over all, Samuel Barnett (silver) and on tie-break Ryan Zhang (bronze) who unfortunately lost one game because of loss of Internet. Winning all four games below the bar was Russian junior Fedor Dmitriev (10k).

Four players at the top were unbeaten going into the last round: Hiroki Kanno, Lucas Neirynck, Chao Zhang and remarkably Joseph Cranmore (1k). It was the first two of these that won to qualify for the final. Played on shortened time limits the other players were able to watch an exciting final game ending just on midnight. Despite having played all through Hong Kong's night, Hiroki Kanno was the winner by resignation, taking the gold and £50 first prize. Belgium's Lucas Neirynck therefore took the silver and the bronze went to Wei Zhou after applying the MSO tie breaks. After Davide in fourth, Joseph and Chao were placed fifith and sixth, and in equal seventh were Maciej Brzeski and Tim Hunt.

Results