UK Stay Top of B-League

The sixth round of the B-League on 20th February saw the UK playing and beating Austria, to stay at the top of the B-League.

Daniel Hu wrote about his game against Viktor Lin: I lost by resignation. I played quite calmly in the opening, aiming for a long game. He had an interesting tesuji to settle the top right, and it worked well with his thickness from attacking my weak group. It was probably proper for me to make two eyes with my weak group earlier on, but he ambitiously fought in my area of influence. I got an extremely good result and he lost most of his territory on the right, while his centre group was still hanging. Probably I played too slowly as usual and soon entered overtime.

He then came to attack my weak group and I got out pretty comfortably. I tried to live actively while capturing a tail of his centre group and succeeded for the most part, until a sudden misread meant my capture turned round to capture me. I played a rather desperate invasion, and it was actually pretty hard to read, but in the end I lost by one liberty, after chasing his group all the way into my territory.

After the game, I noticed that Black had some extremely bad aji on the right side if White played hane as the centre group was not alive. It would have been better to probe there before the desperate invasion to see how much Black was willing to give up to live.

Chris Bryant wrote about his game against Martin Unger: I won my game by a few points. My play was terrible, was lucky to win, made some really stupid mistakes.

I thought the opening was okay for both, and in the early middlegame I got a bit of an advantage, after I guess he missed the threat of a double damezumari on his group on the right, when he took sente to play on the lower side, so I ended up very thick. But then it felt like I forgot how to play about halfway through the middlegame, was a total mess, just flimsy nonsense moves, crap locally, crap globally, taking my own liberties and similar stupid nonsense.

He made a silly mistake in the late middlegame and I could've killed something, but it was one of those positions where you had to play the moves in the right order, and I didn't. A win is a win I guess, but I'm glad that one is over, urgh.

Jon Diamond wrote about his game against Bojan Cvjetkovic: A quite nice win by resignation for me, thank goodness. Luckily my opponent had had quite a hard day (at work I presume), so when I gave him a hard time it was just too much.

I had a decentish opening, giving away some certain points in one corner, but getting the opportunity to create a big moyo as compensation. He pushed a bit too hard and created some stones that didn’t have many liberties, so the overall fight building out into the centre was probably just too difficult for him. On the other hand I didn’t see that he could cut into what I thought was my definite territory in return, but he failed to capitalise on this and so my territory was overall almost as big as his and I had all the potential. He thinks his move 97 is where he went seriously wrong, as I fixed up my side and kept pressing in the middle. However, I didn’t see that the hane at 115 was so strong and that I couldn’t immediately cut - I created some aji to allow me to do so, but I think he should just have give me some points and retained sente plus ensuring the connection of his central stones.

After that he was really struggling to live; perhaps he could have done, it was certainly difficult, but he failed in the end, so that was that.

Des Cann wrote about his game against Lisa Mayer: Won my game by resignation. Took two corners with joseki. Took some territory at the bottom and a third corner became half mine. I formed a moyo round last corner and my opponent invaded and died. She had a bit of thickness/moyo in the centre but never enough to compensate. When she lost a couple of cutting stones she conceded.

League Page with game records