Ho Yeung Woo Wins MSO GP

After holding the Mind Sports Olympiad (MSO) online in 2020 and 2021, it was decided to continue with an online games festival each winter to balance the actual MSO each August. The second such MSO Grand Prix, as it is called, started in February 2023 and features two Go events. The first of these was the 19x19 which attracted 45 players. Because of the large increase in players, up from 11 to 45, it was run as a McMahon not a Swiss. It was nice to see a lot of juniors taking part, including a large group from Turkey, and indeed one of the juniors nearly won one of the medals.

Winning all four games to take the gold medal place was Ho Yeung Woo (5d Nottingham). Second on tie break was Yat Hin Yorkson Cheung (5d Hong Kong) and third was Jun Su (4d Cambridge University). Top junior was Ryan Zhang (2d London) who was also placed fourth overall. Kwun Yin Ng (1d UK) won Junior silver and Alper Sulak (2d Turkey) took bronze on tie break from Chun Yin Ng (2k UK).

Also doing well further down the rank list were Philipp Meng (12k Germany) and Lytton Yao (16k Edinburgh) who each won four out of four. Results

Thanks go to Paul Smith for running the draw, with chat assistance from Colin Williams, and to the Takumi Go Academy for providing the game commentary analysis of the top board in the final round YouTube.