The UK youth team has played its first match in the European Youth Go Team Championship. We were drawn against the relatively strong French team so we knew we needed to field our strongest team.

Unfortunately Ryan was not able to play in the U12 section, but Lea Wong stepped up making her debut appearance for the team. On paper we were in with a chance although it looked likely to depend on some very even games, but with grades potentially being out of date due to lockdown it was going to be tough.

Lea played first on board 5 and did well to secure a win by 2.5 points. Jacob stepped up next on board 1 playing a French 3 dan. I watched his game and it was a masterclass in how to convert a big central area into territory to take a comfortable win. So we were 2-0 up, needing one more win, but we expected to be slightly outgraded on the last three boards.

George and Daniel finished their games next, each losing.

The London Go Centre continues to add teaching videos to its extensive collection on their YouTube channel.

Latest uploads include reviews by Daniel Hu of the games in the Adult-Youth match and the first of a series by professional Mateusz Surma: Fuseki Insights.

I am pleased to announce our UK Youth Go Team for this year's European Youth Go Team Championship is as follows:

U20 players
Jacob Zhang 3dan
Jayden Yui-Him Ng 1 dan

U16 players
Sam Barnett 2k
Edmund Smith 3k
Scott Cobbold 3k

U12 players
Daniel Chun Yang 1d
Ryan Zhang 2k
George Han 3k
Lea Wong 5k
Yanyi Xiong 9k
Alexander Timperi 10k

This youth team tournament is played over four rounds with five boards in each match of which one must be U20, two U16 and two U12. Despite losing two of our strongest players from last year (Yueran Wang and Bill Shen) to the pressures of sixth form exams, this is still our strongest team yet. The grade boundaries for the U16 and U12 selection have both moved up.

The UK youth team celebrated Halloween by playing their first round match in the CCTV World Youth Amateur On-line Weiqi Tournament. Held on the Chinese server called Yike and sponsored by Chinese TV, this new event has 22 teams from around the world taking part on weekends between now and the end of the year.

Our first match was against Colombia and was won two games to one. Jayden Ng lost a close game to Juan David Ramirez Jimenez, Scott Cobbold beat Alan Yeray Cortes Sarmiento by resignation and Caleb Monk beat Alen Vasquez Quiroga by 64.5.

In the individual junior section, Ryan Zhang did well, narrowly beating Yuki Kouchi of Japan.
26 players are taking part.

In the first match of the new season of the Pandanet Go European Team Championship B-League the UK beat Belgium three games to one. There were wins for Daniel Hu, Alex Kent and Jamie Taylor, their game reports are below. This placed UK second behind Germany who beat Croatia four-nil and just ahead of Finland who beat Netherlands.

League Page with game records

Jamie wrote: Against Gabriel Mercier I managed to isolate a nice chunk of stones fairly early on, but then messed up the capture a bit, giving away some nice influence in exchange unnecessarily. I thought I was only a bit ahead after that, but my opponent played some slow moves and let me neutralize the influence to get comfortably ahead. I lost the ability to read towards the end and let him capture some important stones but my opponent seemed to be having the same difficulty and I managed to hold on to the lead and win by resignation.

The online youth event for October, held on the afternoon of Sunday 4th, was the delayed finals of the 2019-2020 UK Go Challenge. 33 young players battled over six rounds on 13x13 boards. This time the winner was Ryan Zhang from London. Second was Cyrus Hi Him Shek from Ayrshire and third was Gene Wong from Fern Hill Primary School, on tie-break from Scott Cobbold and Lea Wong (Top Girl). David Baldwin and Caleb Monk, both 11k, notably won five games.

We held our second online British youth training tournament today, reports Alison Bexfield. Any British youth player who has reached at least 20 kyu in strength is invited to these events, where we run a three round tournament online with even games to test the players in tournament conditions and see who has been improving. We expect players wanting to be selected for the British Youth Team to try to participate in these events.

This was our second such event. We were missing some of our top players who were in transit back to schools, but still had an excellent turnout of 32 players (including our ghost). This time we had a closely fought top group with six players all around 3 kyu in strength. This group included a couple of players who have risen rapidly in strength over the past six months. One of these rising stars, Sam Barnett (U16, Cheadle Hulme), was undefeated to take first place.

29 players took part in the BGA's third online tournament, played one game a day over the August bank-holiday weekend. Zherui Xu (4d Cambridge) came out as winner for the second time in these online tournaments and won a £25 Amazon voucher. Second place went to Mark Baoliang Zhang (1k) and third place went to Yangran Zhang (3d) who won £20 and £15 vouchers respectively. A strong showing from Sheffield Go club saw both Teague Johnstone (6k) and Steve Andrews (14k) win £15 vouchers each for winning all three of their games. Another Sheffield prize winner was David Wildgoose, picking up a £5 voucher for the tied highest-placed DDK prize. Dutch player Gérold Nicolasen (10k) picked up the other half of that prize and Gene Wong (3k) won a £10 voucher for the highest placed below-the-bar player.

Results

The "Supergo" match on KGS between twelve British youth players and a team of twelve Chinese youth players continued throughout July and into August. After the strong runs of some of our early players, the Chinese last player Li Yuze won six games in a row to set up a final against our last player, Jayden Ng (British Youth Go Champion). After an exciting game, Jayden won by 11.5 to complete the match in our favour. Our congratulations go to all who took part and our thanks to the youngsters from the The Li Ang Go Collection Team for playing us.

This year's Mind Sports Olympiad was played online, with the Go events on OGS (online-go.com). 46 players took part in the main 19x19 tournament on the afternoon and evening of Sunday 23rd August. As well as a lot of UK players and quite a few from elsewhere in Europe, there were players spanning time zones from America to Hong Kong. With the bar at 4k the top players battled over four rounds to see who would make the final, whilst below the bar a big group of players played enjoyable games, though some of the handicaps got as high as 19!

As many as 14 of the players were juniors who had quite a late night as the fourth round games ended between 10:00 and 11:00. Junior medals went to Italy's Davide Bernardis (gold) who was also fourth over all, Samuel Barnett (silver) and on tie-break Ryan Zhang (bronze) who unfortunately lost one game because of loss of Internet. Winning all four games below the bar was Russian junior Fedor Dmitriev (10k).