UK Go Top of League Beating Sweden

In the second match of the new season in the B-League, the UK played and beat Sweden by three games to one. It was a long evening for the spectators as the top board was scheduled one hour after the others and that game lasted three hours.

Previous league leaders Germany lost four-nil to Italy (including two no-shows) and so the UK moved up to first place, the only team to win both matches so far.

League Page with game records

Daniel Hu wrote: I had a toughish game against Charlie Åkerblom, spending too much time thinking in the opening and not with a great result. I tried playing a bit more solidly with my shape. My opponent made a largish moyo but I got out with weak group one into the centre in sente and invaded with a ladder breaker. My opponent capped, letting me pull out the ladder stone and attack the weaknesses on both sides. I lived fairly comfortably with weak group two "in sente", giving up the three cutting stones that I pulled out from the ladder, eradicating all of my opponent's territory there.

I then made a serious mistake, missing a way for my opponent to get an extra forcing move threatening a cut in weak group one and threatening the life of my weak group two. Or rather I saw something similar but played a move that failed to defend against it. My opponent struck and weak group one was attacked. Though it was easy to make shape and I had one eye, my opponent made an enormous moyo on the left side at the seventh line. And I noticed that weak group two was also killable (in ko) but delayed defending until I was ahead. I would surely have lost if my opponent had noticed it.

But being behind, I cut and invaded the moyo again and Black let me out to half connect to weak group two in exchange for capturing two cutting stones and keeping a fourth line territory on the left. It felt slack, but Black still seemed ahead. As the endgame began, he cut weak group one off but in a way that gave it two eyes and the big endgame move in the upper left - my shape had been very bad there before. Then my opponent killed off my lower right. I could have had a ko for life there previously, but one which would kill weak group two and give Black first line moves to monkey jump in to my biggest territory, so it wasn't as big as it looked. I responded, blocking off the monkey. Black proceeded to add a lot of moves inside my biggest territory and it seemed Black had something very powerful, but ended up only sacrificing it all with a small squeeze on the outside and losing lots of points in the centre.

I won by 15.5 points.

Alex Kent wrote: I won as black by resignation against Leif Almrot.

The opening was pretty symmetrical early on, but my opponent played a couple of slow moves which allowed me to gain a small lead. This turned into a significant advantage after a dodgy corner invasion gave me a lot of thickness.

Things were going swimmingly until I misread a life and death problem and responded when I didn't need to (more tsumego practice required). This allowed my opponent to split my right side into two weakish groups and I lost most of my lead.

At this point I turned on some death metal and picked a slightly unreasonable looking fight. This turned out well as I was able to make use of my central thickness, and the game once again became favourable.

My opponent then tried harder to split the right side, but this backfired and the original splitting stones died.

Jon Diamond wrote about his game with Robin Nilsson: A fairly placid and slow start (in time as well as pace), trying to make sure I didn’t cut up some of my own stones for a change.

Then a bit of a fight in the upper left centre created a couple of cutting groups – having to be careful as the large one on the centre right was a little delicate, I didn’t want to pull it into this fight. However, he was already in byoyomi.

Whoa, both sets of stones escaped!

Then he got a little greedy and captured my top left group in exchange for a ko in the bottom right. In turn, my winning this ko threatened to capture some stones on the right, probably enough compensation as there was still some aji in the top left. He tried to save these stones in a big semeai, but lost 14 stones in so doing and then the semeai stones by one move, and resigned.

In fact his bottom right group may now be dead - an exercise for the reader?

Jamie Taylor wrote: I got behind pretty early gainst Lova Wåhlin when the group I was using to split two weakish groups turned out to be dead. I flailed around a bit reasonably successfully, and maybe even got ahead at one point, but left too many weaknesses lying around and had to give up too many points to stay alive. I thought it might be close, but I lost by 37.5 points.