UK Beat Slovakia

The second match of the C-League season was against Slovakia. Scott, Alex and Jamie all won, but Bruno lost, meaning the team won 3-1. South Africa also scored a second match win (against Norway) to put them top, with us just behind in second.

League Page with game records

Bruno Poltronieri wrote: I lost my game against Ondrej Králik by resignation. I misplayed a ko early on. I should have ignored his threat to take a small lead, but thought I could answer once and ignore his follow-up threat which was smaller. I didn't expect him to ignore my only threat which I thought was too big to fail. After that the game is probably even, but I went down the wrong path of giving up my heavy group in exchange for the bottom side. I had more potential than my opponent, but failed to realise how easily he'd be able to live there. After that I was too far behind.

Scott Cobbold wrote of his game against Boris Dovcík: I won my game. At the start I took many points and had to deal with my group. Later on I was ahead, but played a few errors in the early endgame and the game became very close. However then my opponent made a big mistake and conceded many points, whilst their group became ko to live, after which they resigned.

Alex Kent wrote about his game: I won as black by 25.5 against Peter Smolarik. It was a fun fighting game where I launched an attack early on which ended up killing a reasonably large group. After this I just needed to be a bit responsible about reducing his moyo, but I made a pretty embarrassing mistake where my monkey jump died and this made the game much closer. We had a bit more fighting later on which went my way to bring the game to a close.

Jamie Taylor wrote about his game with Martin Lukac: I don't understand my game but I did win it. I thought I'd lost when I tried to live in my opponent’s sphere of influence and couldn't find anything despite there being more aji than I've ever seen in one place. Not being able to find anything I settled with living small in the corner and playing out the rest of the game, then at some point, when I wasn't looking, I got a 25 point lead. Katago tells me that what I thought was going on was wrong the whole time. It seems that all I ever needed to do was live small in the corner, so it's a good thing all my attempts to do something else failed. I think my 25 point lead just came from my opponent playing one or two slack moves in the early endgame, which is a scary lesson.