UK Youth Team result against Germany

On Saturday 11th November 2017, the UK youth team played their opening match, against one of their hardest adversaries, Germany. We lost by 4 boards to 1. This was in the first round of the new season of the European Youth Go Team Championship 2017/18 (EYGTC). Please follow that link for names of the complete UK youth team squad.

  Post-match comments (see below for comments prior to the games): 

The UK Youth Go Team played Germany in the first round of the European Youth Go Team Championship yesterday (11 November). Due to a strong performance in the previous season, the UK were seeded into the top half of the draw, so this first match was always going to be tough.

We were outranked by at least 5 grades on boards 1, 3 and 5. Although our players - Tom Bradbury, Josh Gorman and Alexander Hsieh - fought hard, these 3 games ended as predicted with losses. Tom was making his debut performance for the UK team, having made a significant improvement in grade over the past year, from 13 kyu at the start of 2017 to 5 kyu when the squad was selected in October.

We were pinning the UK hopes on boards 2 and 4 to pick up some board points, where the games were close on paper (although with junior grades you never know how of out of date they are). Yueran Wang (our only dan player) was on board 2 but, with some early mistakes, he was unable to pull the game back.

Our most exciting match was therefore on board 4, where our youngest player, George Han (3 kyu) was playing a German 4 kyu. For the spectators it looked as if George was losing the game in the middle, when a group failed to live, but George is a tricky player who does not give up and he fought back, creating complications that saw him create a ko which spectacularly brought him back into the game and an eventual comfortable win by over 20 points.

So the overall result was a 4-1 win for Germany, leaving us around the middle of the 12-team tournament. Our next match is on 26 November.

  Alison Bexfield, Team Captain 

  Pre-match comments:  

Each year the UK enters a team in the European online youth go championships. This is a team event of four or five rounds. There are twelve teams competing this year. We field five players in each round (one U20, two U16 and two U12 players) out of a team of up to 15 players.

Our team for this event has been picked from our youth squad, taking account of the three age bands, as follows:

U20: Zaki Betesh (4k), Tom Bradbury (5k) and Charlotte Bexfield (6k)

U16: Yueran Wang (3d), Oscar Selby (5k), Edmund Smith (5k), Josh Gorman (5k), Jack Nolan (12k), Wenzhou Mei (12k) and Aidan Wong (12k)

U12: George Han (3k), Alexander Hsieh (9k), Jianzhou Mei (15k) and Zoe Walters (18k)

Because we did well last year, finishing fourth, we have been seeded in the top half of the draw and hence our first match is against one of the stronger teams, Germany.

The team play this match on 11 November at 2pm. You can follow their games live on the kgs go server. Our players for this match will be Tom, Yueran, Josh, George and Alexander.

  Alison Bexfield, Team Captain