UK Lose Play-Off to Finland

As they ended second in the C-League, the UK team had to play a five-board play-off match against B-League’s Finland. The opposition fielded three 5d players and so seemed likely to win, and in fact did so by winning all five boards. So Finland stay in B-League, joined by Ireland who replace demoted South Africa. [See here for League Page with game records.]

In the other play-offs Slovakia gained promotion to C-League by beating Georgia who will move down to D-League together with Bulgaria who had one of their players results overturned after cheating (with Kyrgyzstan promoted), and Sweden beat Austria to take their place in the A-League, whilst Germany as B-League winners replace Serbia.

Daniel Hu had trouble connecting and this delayed the start of the match. In his game against Javier-Aleksi Savolainen, he lost a corner when his opponent invaded and ended up 22.5 behind.

Bruno Poltronieri wrote: In my game, I lost by 9.5 against Jesse Savo. It wasn't a bad game, but it was a tough one for me. I had too many unsettled groups and fronts to fight on which I struggled to manage. It was an even game for the first 100 moves or so and I had some chances later, but I didn't manage to grab them, losing by 9.5.

Alex Kent wrote: I ended up losing by 12.5 points to Vesa Laatikainen. Fighting began early in a corner where Vesa insisted on playing some variation of the flying dagger 3-3 joseki. This backfired though, and I ended up with a really nice result with a centre group that was much stronger than my opponent's. I messed up soon after though, possibly playing too passively, and white's group also became strong. The game was even again. I'm generally really happy with how the middle game went - it's hard to pinpoint big mistakes - but things started to go awry in the end game. This began with a missed tesuji on move 177, where I could have gained the advantage with a nice double-threat which is somewhat obvious in hindsight. I was about 6 points behind when the last dame were being filled and I allowed a big rip-off in my lower-right corner when I was in time trouble (I read some kind of double-ko which never materialised) and lost by 12.5. Despite the final margin, I am overall pretty happy with how well I played.

Scott Cobbold wrote about his game against Olli Hella: In the start I got a lead after they made some joseki mistakes, but in the end I lost my advantage in a fight and they built a big moyo. After this I didn't attack their group well, meaning I couldn't make up the points deficit and resigned.

Des Cann wrote: Unfortunately I had a poor game against Olli Ervelä. I was doing okay, but I played too simply. I didn't mix it up enough so it became a moyo game. Then I managed to create a dead group in his moyo and never recovered. Losing by 17.5