UK Lose to Ireland

The UK team was matched against Ireland, the other top C-League team, in round four. The teams agreed to play three of the games early, on the Monday, to avoid playing on Saint Valentine’s Day. Unfortunately the Irish team won all three and this left Tim Hunt to try and salvage a single game on the day itself. He kept the crowd entertained for a couple of hours until finally the massacre was complete. This put Ireland back on top and moved UK down to second or third on tie-break. [See here for League Page with game records.]

Bruno Poltronieri wrote: I also suffered a disappointing loss by 5.5 to Karl Irwin. This was mainly caused by two complete hallucinations whilst I was low on time...The first happened after around 130 moves. I had gained a solid lead, of apparently 16 points which to be honest is far more than I thought during the game. I then tried to be clever and completely misread something very basic, losing about 10 points. A couple of quick overreactions afterwards lost me the lead completely.

I then managed to claw it back in endgame, bringing things back to a completely even position. Then during a ko I played a ko threat, forgetting than my opponent’s move to finish the ko also threatened to capture a quarter of the board. After that there was nothing I could do.

Alex Kent wrote: I suffered a slightly disappointing 1.5 point loss as white against Ireland's Philippe Renaut. I think I played quite nicely in the opening, doing a pretty effective job of obstructing my opponent's plans by making a strongish group on the top. We got into a tricky position in the lower right where we both had some weaknesses, but I was feeling pretty comfortable. A sequence got played out that, from afar, I judged as close to winning for me - but once it was on the board it wasn't nearly as clear-cut.

I had a chunk of territory though with some pretty bad aji. He had a lot of potential in the centre. What commenced was some damage control where I basically succeeded in all of my goals (including getting my own central territory and living everywhere), but shockingly the game was still extremely close. I won't go into a lot more detail here, but suffice to say that I barely survived the attack of the bad aji and it really came down to some small endgame oversights.

Scott Cobbold played Gavin Rooney and lost by resignation. An early deep invasion failed and some close fights finally saw Scott losing a group in the middle.

Tim Hunt wrote: Sorry, I played consistently with the team and lost against James Hutchinson. In the end it was by resignation, but only because I tried silly kos when I knew I was about 10 points behind.

I mostly got the better of the opening, and then tempted my opponent into an ill-advised attack on a group with about one and a half eyes, where his attacking group ended up with no eyes. However, I kept attacking for too long, until he got time to reduce my group to one eye. I did manage to kill one of groups in exchange, but it was not enough, even though he was low on time.