About 30 players enjoyed the 2nd Nottingham kyu training day and rapid tournament. It was held, as in 2018, in The Dice Cup board game cafe, near the city's Victoria Centre. The number of players was boosted by a minibus of students from Cheadle Hulme School (CHS), accompanied by Martin and Helen Harvey, and physics teacher Mike Winslow.

In the morning the teaching was given by Andrew Kay, Sandy Taylor, Martin Harvey, Robin Dews, Carl Roll and Tetsuro Yoshitake, a student from Japan, studying at the University of Nottingham.

In the afternoon there was a three-round rapid-play tournament, with 30 minutes per player, sudden death. The winner was Tetsuro Yoshitake (3d Nottingham), who won all three games including that against Andrew Kay (4d Birmingham). Tetsuro was presented with the Nottingham Tournament Trophy, which is engraved with the names of previous winners of the Nottingham Tournament, from the 1980s, around 2010 and from 2018.

The latest edition of Youth Go News has been published, No. 5 May 2019.

If you missed any, then old editions are available.

Please tell any young players you know about it.

Fifteen players gathered in the small Hertfordshire town of Letchworth, more formally known as Letchworth Garden City, to play in this year's Candidates' Tournament, the first round of the British Championship. It was held at the community hall called "The Settlement" and we are grateful to Simon and Alison Bexfield who arranged the venue and also acted as ghosts. Our thanks also go to Matt Marsh for running the Tournament.

As usual the event had six rounds over three days of the first May Bank Holiday, run on the Swiss system. With six players to qualify for the Challenger's League, four wins would almost certainly ensure qualification, while with three wins one would need to do well on the tie-break to qualify.

Andrew Kay (3d Birmingham) made sure he wasn't worried by tie-break by winning all six. Sam Bithell (1d Cambridge) did very well, only losing to Andrew. On four wins were Boris Mitrovic (2d Edinburgh), Tim Hunt (2d Milton Keynes) and Jamie Taylor (2d Cambridge).

In the last match of the season, our team had trouble against a lower-graded team from Turkey. They lost board one and two to draw the match. However the match point scored kept the team above the relegation zone and their final position in the B-League was 7th.

Andrew Simons wrote: Annoying loss for me against Hakki Burak Güner. The opening and early middle game went well. However the h4 “timesuji” blunder should have been at r13. He ignored this and attacked well; I helped him kill me. Then I messed up some more.

Alex Kent wrote: I lost by resignation to Ugur Arikan. My game was a bit disappointing - credit to my opponent as he didn't seem to make any real mistakes! The opening contained three 3-3 joseki (I made a large shimari in the fourth corner) and it seemed pretty balanced. I experimented a bit in the lower-left and destroyed the side rather than taking the corner. I don't think I got a bad result there.

The Spring 2019 edition of the BGJ is now available for members to read.

Our team was outplayed by a strong team from Sweden, losing all four games. This leaves the team still in seventh place in the B-League, but only on tie-break. The final match of the season will be on Tuesday 5th May, against Turkey.

Alex Kent wrote: I lost by resignation against Fredrik Blomback. The opening did not go well: I went wrong in a "windmill" joseki in the upper-left. I ended up needing to live small while my opponent got a wall. Definitely one I need to investigate! Early in the middle game I started playing more aggressively to try and catch up, but this backfired dramatically and I barely survived. Later on things got a little exciting and I tried a few tricks but to no avail.

Jon Diamond wrote: Against Charlie Akerblom, for a change I didn’t screw things up in the early middle game, but I nearly did so! Decent exchanges in the fuseki and I created a running weak group...

Each year the British Go Congress is held in a different place, with the BGA's Annual General Meeting on the Saturday evening. The 2019 edition was held in the MacDonald Hotel on Manchester's London Road, not far from Piccadilly Station. The weekend started with a teaching session on Friday afternoon with Toby Manning. That evening the British Open Lightning was held; it was won by London's Peikai Xue (2d), shown below left with the trophy.

On the Saturday and Sunday 80 players, many of whom were below 10k, enjoyed the usual six round British Open tournament. It was for the first time won by Chao Zhang (6d) from London, with six wins. Zherui Xu (4d) from Cambridge was placed second with five wins, ahead of Zihe Zhao (4d Oxford) and Nagisa Matsuura (1d Leeds).

After the troubles caused by the snow at last year’s Irish Go Congress, this year it was played under clear skies and ran extremely well. The Confucius Institute was not supporting the event and so the venue reverted to the tradition one, The Teachers’ Club on Parnell Square. Over the weekend 42 players, including visitors from seven countries, took part in the Go.

This started with the 18-player Irish Rapid on the evening of Friday 22nd March. As usual the rounds speeded up from twenty to twelve minutes and the number and size of handicap gaps reduced as the strong players started to dominate. Tunyang Xie (4d) from Cambridge won all five games to take the title. London’s Xunrui Zhao (3d) and Trondheim’s Juan-Manuel Losada (1d) took the next two places.

The Irish Open got underway two minutes early on the Saturday morning (a record) and ran extremely well for the next two days, if you did not mind the noise of a church service coming from next door on the Sunday.

When the Welwyn Garden City Tournament found that the sports centre housing their Bridge Club venue was closing, the organiser, John Collins, had to move the event to the Sunday and to the new venue of the Harpenden Arms, in the High Street of the nearby town. This is also the venue of the new Harpenden Go Club, so it was in fact a good way to promote that too.

It was a bright sunny spring morning, good for travelling by road, but unfortunately a power failure on the railway meant no Thameslink trains at all from London that morning.

Our team played very well and got their first win of the season, against Norway. This moved the team up to seventh place and out of the relegation zone. The next match will be on Tuesday 16th April, against Sweden.

Andrew Simons wrote: I won my game against Severin Hanevik after more than three hours of play and 331 moves including passes. I played an AI-style early 3-3 and then was happy he gave me the thick old joseki in bottom left even though he got sente. He surprised me when he resisted my attachment and took the outside ponnuki, and again when he didn't connect up to the corner; LeelaZero says he should have done so immediately and I should have prevented that instead of my solid tiger mouth. Nevertheless I had a ko for later. I then peeped his wall, as is the rage these days and built a reduction group. I used that to start the ko, but did so too early as he correctly ignored my threat.