A Tale of Two Germany's Matches

The UK youth Go teams in two different European leagues co-incidentally both played Germany last week.

In the Pandanet European Youth Go Championship the match was very even in terms of grade on most boards other than board 5 where we had a 3 grade advantage. Lukasz Kudla duly took a win on that board - although the game was not without excitement as he lost a group early on but went on to kill an extremely large group that went across the board giving him a 41 point win. Our other players had less success. Michael Mitcham-Harding lost by resignation in his game on board 1, as did Yanyi Xiong on board 2. Zoe Walters' game on board 4 also saw Zoe fight hard to successfully rescue a group that at one point was severely lacking in eyes, but she then was unable to convert enough territory and lost her game. Andrew Volovich on Board 3 was holding his own but in the end lost by 4.5 points leaving the UK 4-1 down against Germany. This leaves us in 4th place of six teams in League A with one match to play. This will be against the third placed team - Croatia. Winning this match could move us up to third place overall but we know this will be a tough match.

In the European Youth Go Team Competition our team faired better. We were stronger on paper on the top three boards and weaker on the bottom two. The boards went by grade as Alvina Kwok, Daniel Yang and Sung Hee Lim all picked up wins, while Aidan Fung and Blake Shamoon succumbed to their stronger opponents. Our 3-2 win over Germany places us top of the tournament after the 4 rounds. However this year the event has the top four teams playing semi-finals and a final so we will need to repeat some of our victories if we are to win the event overall.