Sixteen top European players qualified to the 3rd European Grand Prix Finale by earning qualifying points from the top European tournaments of 2019. They met up at Leksand in Sweden in January to battle over six rounds, starting with four-player groups, followed by a knock-out stage.

Daniel Hu's great result at the London Open meant he could take part and he had an excellent tournament. He topped Group D, beating two pros, Pavol Lisy and Tanguy Le Calvé, but losing to Stanislaw Frejlak of Poland. He then beat France's Benjamin Dréan-Guénaïzia to reach the semi-finals. This he lost to the Ukrainian pro Artem Kachanovskyi, then he lost again to Stanislaw Frejlak in the play-off to end fourth.

The Winter 2019-2020 edition of the BGJ is now available for members to read.

Rhubarb the Clown (aka Martin Solity 5k) appeared on ITV's "Midsommer Murders" on 14th January. In circus-themed episode 6 of series 20 "Send in the Clowns", Rhubarb is one of three clowns seen in the last scene of the episode.

The UK youth team played Romania in their third round match of the 2019/20 European Youth Go Team Championship (EYGTC) over the weekend of 18th and 19th January.

Alison Bexfield, team captain, writes:

Romania are a strong team so we fielded our strongest players this round. The match was split over two days, Saturday and Sunday at various times.

First on board 1 Yueran was up against a very strong player (a 6 dan). He put up a really good fight with the online score estimate suggesting he was holding his own for much of the game but in the end the result went according to grade.

On board 3 our up and coming player Scott was playing a 2 dan. Scott has improved rapidly since the autumn when he was playing at 6 kyu as his results in the London Open showed, putting him around 2 kyu. The game was exciting to watch being really close right to the end when Scott just clinched it by 3.5 points.

It was all fun and games at the Hitachi-Maidenhead Tournament. The selection of games available as prizes is shown left. Also non-playing organiser Alison kept other non-players and early finishers amused with various card and dice games. In the Go 35 players battled over three rounds with London's Peikai Xue (2d) being unbeaten to win the event. Runner up this time was Jon Diamond (2d), third was Jacob Zhang (4d) and fourth Kalle Timperi (1d). All those on two wins got the choice of one of the prize games, wine or cash as a prize, whereas those on three wins got two of the three choices. Those on three were Gokul Ramanan Subramanian (3k Cambridge), Oliver Bustos-Langton (6k Keele) and Oliver Bardsley (17k Sir John Lawes). Best school team, winning some old Go World magazines was Sir John Lawes.

26 players (and a few hangers-on) attended the second Harpenden Go Tournament (previously the Welwyn Garden City Go Tournament) on Sunday 12th January, which had an upped entry level of 1 dan. It was held again in the Harpenden Arms Public House, which still had its Christmas Lights up to honour the tournament, which wouldn't have happened on last year's March date. Afterwards some of the players enjoyed dinner at a local Italian restaurant.

Toby Manning (1d) was the overall winner, just clinching the final game of the final round against Michael Webster (1d), by a small margin, as shown above.

In the fifth match of the season, our team lost against Switzerland, dropping to sixth position in the B-League.

Andrew Simons wrote: I won my marathon game against Fabien Lips by resignation. It started with a fight from a modern double approach joseki, which got even more complicated when I thought my centre group was strong enough to make an attacking invasion to split his left side and corner. I made a little barely alive group in the gap which unsettled his and we jumped out with several one point jumps, which when he made a territorial move on the top I aimed to wedge and kill his group. He did spot that, but I got a big local profit in exchange. He surprised me by defending on the top, so I tried to surround and kill his group again; he made some not-living exchanges on the side which I answered wrongly, because it meant I couldn't kill his L group later, and he wriggled out of my bad aji net. But I attacked his other weak group and managed to sort of kill it.

Nineteen participants ranging in age from mid-teens upwards, from eight countries took part in the traditional London Open Rengo tournament on the afternoon of New Year's Eve. We could have had eight teams, reports Jenny Rolf-Radcliffe, but that would have lent itself to a boring number of pairs. Thus we had two fours, three threes and one pair to make the games more interesting - after all, a large part of the fun of Rengo is to have games between teams of different sizes. This year was very balanced; at the end of three rounds there were no teams on zero wins and just one team on three wins. The unanimous decision was made to stop playing while we had a clear winner, and to get on with the eating, drinking and talking phases of the evening.

On the 28th December, dozens of people assembled in the capital for the London Open (the 46th), held this year for only the second time at the current London Go Centre. Despite the fact that more entrants were allowed this year (one hundred), there were a fair number of 'no-shows' which meant just 87 players actually took part. This was disappointing and unfair to the people on the waiting list who couldn't enter because the entry limit had been reached; organiser Gerry Gavigan will make sure that next year only those who have paid the full entry fee on booking will be guaranteed a place.

Sixteen countries fielded players with ages ranging 'from seven to seventy-seven'. The grades ranged from 7d to 16k; both stronger and weaker players were well represented with 28 dan players and 15 Double-digit kyus, six of whom were from Cheadle Hulme School (CHS).

In the fourth match of the season, our team (the same players as the previous match) managed a draw against Finland, after a late substitution of a weaker player by them.

Andrew Simons wrote: I won my game against Javier-Aleksi Savolainen by 7.5 points. He played even more slowly than me in the opening, so it was a nice sensible game: after some AI-style josekis he shoulder-hit my not-in-the-middle extension and rather than jumping out he cut off my wall below. As it had made some standard kikashi earlier, I managed to get it out in ok shape; we ran for a bit (I think he shouldn't have let me get j12), he capped my group, but then I went for a small local life/connection, which was locally a bit sad but ok given I'd got a big tenuki out of it, and still wasn't dead. He then used his cap to invade my right side, I got some handy kikashi and connected on top and built a wall, but he took all the territory.