UK Draw With Netherlands

The UK team drew with a much stronger Netherlands team which had three 6d on it. With an all 3d UK team this was a very good result, despite ending 2-2.

Charlie Hibbert wrote: Hmm, I lost to Gilles van Eeden. I've been on a bit of a losing streak as of late. As is common when older players play black against me, I get forced into a calm game. I actually felt I was doing pretty evenly (both had lots of territory, he had more but I had potential) until I over-egged a moyo trying to catch up on cash, and my opponent exploited the weakness very well. After that I was scrubbing around trying to find something for a bit, before resigning.

Des Cann wrote: I lost by 22.5 to Peter Brouwer. I was happy with the start of the game, but it was probably balanced. The game got interesting when I felt he played too many moves capturing a corner, whilst I built a strong moyo with one of his groups in the middle of it. He got the group out at the cost of giving me some solid territory. I tried to keep his stones weak, but this was an overplay and a group of mine nearly died. I escaped capturing a couple of stones, but had to give up half a dozen stones of my own. He outplayed me in the yose to extend his lead.

Daniel Hu wrote: Won by 4.5 against Geert Groenen, a good game for me. After getting killed/nearly killed repeatedly at the London Open, I tried to play more solid this time, just jumping one space, and playing solid with centre control. This was a moyo opening, and it was a perfect style for me to perform after I got totally solid groups. By a weird sealing in of his group, I left a lot of cuts on the outside, which tempted him to use them immediately. This was a bad idea however, as he set up a weak group in my area of influence, and his moyo was severely reduced by the attack. I didn’t really need to invade, just let him make all the 3rd line territory, play a few small tesujis to reduce it and play a solid endgame, when I knew I was leading already. There was a moment where I left a huge ko open as I wasn’t sure if I was ahead, but he didn’t dare to take it as his corner would become a multi-step ko, worth 70+ points, and then I was completely confident of victory.

Jon Diamond wrote: Not a bad game this time against Gelmer Bouwman! I’ve been looking at the odd game that AlphaGo has been playing recently and decided that a more central, larger scale game was needed now, so apart from my second move at 3-3, I played quite high and aiming at a moyo and central dominance. I seemed to achieve this and he tried to invade my large-scale moyo. I tried to kill it, but it came to ko in the end and I figured that I’d got more than enough outside compensation in real territory not to be too worried and gave up the ko to let the group live by a grovelling connection, in order to ensure that there were no weaknesses elsewhere. Regrettably I played a gote yose move which allowed quite a nice tesuji against some of the surrounding stones, to allow him to squeeze them and make some territory himself, to make a significant gain. However, he was too far behind still and I ran out the winner by 10.5 points.

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