Alison Bexfield Playing in World Women's

Alison writes: I am playing in the World Amateur Women's Go Championship. There are 33 players from 33 countries taking part. The top seeds from China, Japan, Korea and Chinese Taipei (Taiwan) do not need to play preliminary rounds. All other countries have been put in four geographical groups to play knock out preliminary rounds. I am in the European group and there are four places available in the preliminary rounds from 15 countries.

The tournament is played with fast time limits (even for me). It comprise no basic time but byoyomi of ten lots of 30 seconds. So not much scope for lengthy thinking on any single move.

It is also being played on the wbaduk server. It was a good thing I did some practice on this in advance of the match. It is actually quite nice to play on, but working out how to join it in the first place and then how to set a game with the right settings was quite difficult.

My first opponent was Viktoriia Symonenko from the Ukraine. After various abortive attempts to set an even game (the server had ranked her at 7d and me at 1d - since I had played some practice games which had reset my rank - and refused to believe we wanted to play an even game). Eventually Victoriia solved the problem by playing another game and losing which adjusted her rank and enabled us to set the game parameters.

With both of us new to this time limit system we probably played faster than we should have done (only one move took longer than 30 seconds), but the end result went with actual grade and was a comfortable win for me.

My next opponent will either be from Croatia or from Czechia. If I win that game I will be through the preliminary rounds to the main tournament.