UK Beat Denmark

The UK team was matched against Denmark in round five and won three games to one; as Ireland also beat Spain 3-1 the UK remains second in League C behind Ireland, with two matches to play. [See here for League Page with game records.]

Bruno Poltronieri wrote: I won my game against Mathis Isaksen by half a point. Pandanet says 1.5 but it doesn't seem to know that there are no points for eyes in seki under Japanese rules. The game didn't start very well. I started a fight in the top left corner, that I didn't really understand to be honest, and ended up playing a few slack moves to settle the position. My opponent was then 5-10 points ahead for quite a while until he tried to invade my bottom left corner. The invasion was probably valid but he didn't play it perfectly and it turned into a ko. To be honest the ko was pretty stressful and I didn't feel great about it, but apparently it's what turned the game around for me. I won the ko in exchange for black getting some centre points. At this point I was winning by 5-10 but my opponent gave me a basic tsumego when I was in time pressure and I messed it up on my last move of byo-yomi, turning my corner into seki. I thought I had thrown the game at this point, but seems I barely had enough to win anyway.

Alex Kent wrote: I won by resignation playing as black against Ruairi Powell. It was an exciting game with lots of fighting. I ended up getting the better of the critical central fight, though with a fair amount of weak group management to do (I probably could have made things a bit simpler). Once I'd lived everywhere I had a healthy territorial advantage and managed to rebuff all invasion attempts solidly. I did rather embarrassingly miss that I could kill a group for a large duration of the endgame. I had counted and knew I was ahead, so was very much in don't-make-a-mistake mode!

Jon Diamond wrote about his game against Mikkel Kragh Mathiesen: I lost an abysmal game. I made some mistakes at the beginning and got >10 points behind. I was always trying to play catch-up and it didn’t work, finally trying something and lost a big central group...

Scott Cobbold wrote about his game against Jannik Gram, who eventually resigned: My opponent made a joseki mistake near the start giving me a lead, then they didn't defend their corner.