The 24th annual European Youth Go Championship (EYGC) will be held in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, during the 2018 Easter holidays. This is the biggest youth competition in Europe, and there are already over 100 youngsters registered, from 8 countries, as at 21st January. There are three age groups: Under-12, Under-16 and Under-20. The BGA has arranged for a group of UK juniors to attend, with the support of DeepMind.

The UK party is 16-strong, as at 21st January - all with flights booked (also accommodation - in one hotel where our own evening 'UK team room' is available). Entry to the competition - and the UK group - is still open, however. The upper age cut-offs for U12 and U16 will be taken as at 31 August of 2006 and 2002 respectively.
The first three days include lectures, coaching and excursions and the last three days are the tournament. It is possible to attend just the tournament.

Of the 94 players from the UK and abroad that played in the 2017 London Open it was the large group of Chinese players currently living in the UK that dominated the event, but also there were two Belgian players in the top 5, Lucas Neirynck in third with 5 wins and Thomas Connor in fifth with 4 wins. The UK's top player, hence winning the David Ward Trophy, was Daniel Hu in fourth place with 4 wins also. In the end it was Weijin Chen who ended unbeaten with seven wins who took the trophy and top cash prize. Second place went to Ho Yeung Woo who only lost in round four to Chen. Chen is shown here in his last round game against Yousun Yang who took sixth.

Alistair Wall (1d) from Wanstead Club in London travelled up to Edinburgh for their annual Christmas Tournament. He topped the list of 19 players at the Skyscanner offices by winning three games out of four. He beat local player Boris Mitrovic (2d), but lost to another local Liu Yen-Ting (1d) who won two out of two.

Others winning three games were Roger Daniel (6k Wanstead), Serhii Gavrylov (7k) and Edinburgh players Robin McLean (10k) and Neil Sandford (15k).

Results

The fourth round of the B-League on 12th December saw the UK playing one of the other teams on three wins, Germany. After some exciting games the match ended a draw. This left UK just above Germany on boards won, but Netherlands were expected to beat Turkey and take the number one spot in the league table.

Daniel Hu wrote: I won against Jonas Welticke 6d by resignation, bring me to an unbelievable 10/10 on pandanet! This was supposed to be my toughest test so far, so while maths has been prioritised this term, I tried to study go for the last 2 weeks, particularly define 3.0 on the computer Go server.

He opened adventurously with four 11-3s. Especially as I wanted to play territorially anyway, this set bells ringing in my head that this should be a territorial game (hard to make frameworks, so I focused on the corners). He invaded 3-3 into my star point and his result was poor when I took the corner (the 10-3 was an inefficient one space extension from a ponnuki).

This year's Coventry Tournament had a new organiser, but the same winner as last year. Taking over the organisation was Norwegian 4d Jonas Egeberg, and local player Philip Leung (4d) again won all three games to top the field of 40 at the event, held in the University of Warwick's Social Sciences Building. Second was Lucretiu Calota, 4d St Albans, and the organiser himself was a creditable third.

Players lower down who won all their games were Andrew Russell (4k Birmingham), Michael Kyle (6k Manchester), Alan Stokes (8k Manchester) and Pierre Oliviere (15k St Albans).

Results

Congratulations go to Jenny Rofe-Radcliffe and Francis Roads for winning two games at the 28th International Amateur Pair Go Championship in Tokyo. They beat the pairs from Chile and Switzerland, losing to three Japanese pairs, to take 25th place.

For a change, a Japanese pair (Unegawa and Takizawa) were the winners. Korea took second, China third and Chinese Taipei fourth. The European Pair Go Champions, Natalia Kovaleva and Dmitry Surin, took ninth and Klara Zaloudkova and Jan Hora, from Czechia, also won three games.

Full results (off-site)

If the parallel student event, Korean pairs took the top two positions, with a Chinese pair third. UK's Joanne Leung was paired with Russia's Alexander Vashurov and they beat Singapore to score one out of four.

Full results (off-site)

I reported, last month, the sad news that Roger Huyshe, President of the BGA, died on Sunday, Nov 12.

Roger's family has now been able to make the funeral arrangements, and has asked that we share them with all BGA members. Below is the information that we've received.

Toby Manning

Final Farewell for Roger Huyshe

Tuesday 12th December 12.30pm
Vale Royal Crematorium, Northwich, Cheshire.

And afterwards at The Golden Pheasant at Plumley.

Family flowers only. Donations, which will be split between charities supported by Roger, may be sent to:

Albert R Slack Ltd
84 South Oak Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 6AT
01625 - 525 063
enquiries@albertrslack.co.uk
Cheshire Funerals

On Saturday 25th November 2017, the UK youth team played their second match, against Czechia. We won by 3 boards to 2. This was in the new season of the European Youth Go Team Championship 2017/18 (EYGTC). Please follow that link for names of the complete UK youth team squad.

  Post-match comments (see below for comments prior to the games): 

The UK Youth Go Team won their match against Czechia 3-2. This leaves the UK in fifth place out of the twelve teams after two rounds. The third round will take place in January.

Our team for the match comprised Yueran Wang, George Han, Edmund Smith, Alexander Hsieh and Zoe Walters. It was Zoe's first appearance in the team.

Yueran (playing up an age group on the U20 board) and Alexander (U12) outranked their opponents slightly on paper and were each able to land a comfortable win.

The 2017 British Youth Go Championship (BYGC) returned to King Edward VI School in Aston, Birmingham, thanks to Andrew Russell and the support of the headmaster there. It attracted a big crowd of young players, in fact 46 competitors, aged from 7 to 18.

Thanks to a large number of oriental players currently living in the UK, there were several dan-graded players, most of whom not being British played in an Open group for cash prizes. Also thanks to a new club at Harpenden Academy (who are shown celebrating their win as best primary school) and a good crop of new players from Edinburgh, Cheadle Hulme and Letchworth there was a large group between 30 and 40 kyu in strength. Some of the games they played were on 13x13.

The third round of the B-League on 14th November saw the UK playing Turkey. Unfortunately the captain forget the time difference and so there was a panic to gather the players in time for a 19:00 start. In the end Bruno Poltronieri was not back in time to play, so the team shuffled up and Jon Diamond played board 4.

The match was bagged with wins on all four boards, leaving them with 12 straight board wins for the season so far.

Daniel Hu wrote: I won by 6.5 against Denis Karadaban. I played pretty slow, somewhat tired. I started with an AlphaGo Master opening, influenced by Deepzengo vs Fujisawa Rina, and my result seemed good. The game was pretty much endgame very early, and we probably both made large mistakes simply because there were so many options (at least I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing). I thought for a while to check if his upper right group was killable, but decided it probably wasn’t.