Andrew Simons at KPMC

Andrew Simons wrote:

I have been playing in the 13th Korean Prime Minister's Cup. This year many game records are available online as the system is automated: every board has a camera above it recording which then has some image recognition software that converts it into a game record. The time difference meant it was hard to watch them live in the UK, but the games are saved on YouTube (and Oro server), and results and records are available on the KPMC website.

It's a 6 round Swiss, with the first round pairing being split and slide based on each country's position last year. That did lead to an unfortunate initial 7d battle with Dusan Mitic of Serbia (who sent a much weaker player last year) vs Taiwan. By the way there is no Irish player this time.

On the first day I lost by 2.5 against the Korean ghost after I got greedy and didn't defend my huge moyo, but it counts as a win for the tournament. Then I lost against Leszek Soldan (4d Poland); I had a good game but played softly with my moyo and lost by 7.5 after losing some stones from an unreasonably obstinate double hane.

The second day I beat Milan Jadron (1d Slovakia) thanks to a cute spiral ladder, and then beat Justin Ching (6d USA) when he defended the wrong way so that I got a great local result in the first fight and didn't lose too much in the rest of the game which we both played in overtime.

On the final day I beat Jon Melting (1d Norway) by resignation and then lost by 7.5 against Radek Nechanicky (5d Czechia). So I ended with 4 wins (but one was a bye) and 18th place. Which is decent but I'm actually disappointed given my last game; I was killing a big group and then panicked with a bad timesuji that let him live. It would have been worth using an overtime period to get 5 wins and 7th place, a rare opportunity to place so high without beating any player above EGF 6d.

New pro Liyan Lyu of China beat Korea in the final.