The Spring 2017 edition of the BGJ is now available for members to read.

The top player at the 39th Bracknell Go Tournament was Lucretiu Calota (4d St Albans) who beat Alistair Wall (1d Wanstead) in the final (pictured). Chao Zhang (6d London) and Jim Clare (1d Reading) took third and fourth places, and Paul Barnard (2k Swindon) took fifth with three wins. Others of the 36 players winning three were Casey Alexander (10k Arundel), Alexander Hsieh (10k Cambridge Juniors) and Lueming Yang (20k Oxford).

Arundel won the team prize, by one win, over the junior team of "A Football Stuck in a Bush Squad". Nobody competed in the 13x13, but winning the puzzle-solving were Jonny Evans (10k London City) and Cate Howe (28k Cheadle Hulme School). Best haiku-writer was Richard Wheeldon.

Results

The Candidates' Tournament was held over the April-May Bank Holiday weekend at the Young Chelsea Bridge Club in West London. 18 of the possible players took part to determine who would play in the next stage of the British Championship, the Challengers' League, on the next bank holiday at the same venue.

Thanks to the organiser, Matt Marsh, setting up a webcam, Chris Bryant was able to rebroadcast the top board game online and it gave a chance to see some of the game on YouTube. Also the players were able on the Sunday to help review some of the games in the parallel Bar-Low Tournament.

After a year's break, the Bar-Low tournament returned, thanks to organiser Jonathan Green at a new comfortable venue - The Young Chelsea Bridge Club, home of the West London Go Club. It was held as usual alongside the Candidates' Tournament.

Thanks to an anonymous donor, the entry fees were cheap, 17 players taking advantage of this. The generous prizes meant that more than half of the competitors made at least their entry fee back, as well as everyone taking home some sweet treats.

Alison Bexfield (1k, Letchworth) was the winner, having secured victory before the last round started. Roger Huyshe (5k, Manchester), Roger Daniel (7k, London) and Lueming Yang (23k, Oxford) also all did well, winning four games out of five.

Results

The 10th round of the B-League on 25th April saw the UK playing Austria. The match was drawn after some good play on boards 1 and 2.

Des Cann wrote: Very happy. Won by 1/2 pt against Viktor Lin ranked 24th on European rating list. He invaded my right-hand side Chinese twice, which was actually reasonable as I had tenukied. Then he leant on my bottom side and went for a severe attack on my small group in between his two groups. However he overplayed his hand and my group lived, cutting of some stones and connecting to my top right corner making it big. From then on he played hard everywhere testing me. It got quite complicated, but nothing fell off. System said I'd won by 12.5, but komi had defaulted to -5.5, so the corrected score was 0.5

Daniel Hu wrote: I won by resign against Lothar Spiegel. My opponent did something weird in the Chinese that I didn’t know what to do against.

The Leo Phillips Isle of Man Go Festival is taking place from 30 July - 4 August 2017. Early bird discounted entries are available until 14 May so please enter soon to take advantage of the reduced price.

This popular event has been held 12 times since 1991 and gives you a chance to mix playing Go with sightseeing on the island. The timetable of tournaments allows you to choose how much time to spend playing Go and how much to spend on other things. And there is a range of side events including a continuous lightning tournament, rengo, 13x13 Go and a quiz. Port Erin, where the festival is held, is a delightful small seaside town in the south west of the island.

There are a lot of interesting things to see on the Isle of Man. There are two castles, a lot of great museums and many good beaches and places to walk and see the wildlife. You can travel on the steam railway and even a horse-drawn tram in Douglas.

The short Annual General Meeting of the British Go Association was held at 20:00 on the Saturday evening of the British Go Congress in Cambridge.

The President, Roger Huyshe, chaired the meeting and, in his report, thanked Paul Barnard and John Collins who had stepped down from the roles of Membership Secretary and Online Committee Chairman, both after several years. He also stated that player development had taken a backseat due to DeepMind’s AlphaGo matches, but this year training sessions were being planned for the autumn.

The membership accepted his and the other officers' reports (including that of new Membership Secretary Chris Kirkham) and on the recommendation of the auditor, Pat Ridley, approved the accounts for 2016. These showed a surplus thanks to DeepMind sponsorship and the omission of a strong player training day.

The Council were re-elected with Richard Wheeldon replacing John Collins.

Stacey Grand Prix 2016-2017

Alistair Wall won for the third year running:

1. Alistair Wall 36
2. Toby Manning 24
3. Andrew Simons 18

Youth Grand Prix 2016

The following get cash prizes thanks to John Rickard's family:

1. Edmund Smith 1024
2. Zaki Betesh 640
3. George Han 621

Double Digit Kyu 2016

Prizes for the two sections go to:

10k-19k Alan Stokes 438 20k+ Joel Barrett 444

The fiftieth British Go Congress was held in Cambridge. The location was the very modern Centre for Mathematical Sciences which lies on its own campus near to Churchill College (which provided accommodation).

The event started on the Friday afternoon with a teaching session with tutors Toby Manning and Matthew Macfadyen. In the evening the Lightning Tournament was run on an extended round-robin system, after which the top two players played a final. Richard Mullens (6k) valiantly took second place to Xunrui Zhao (2d London).

After two days of play in the Open the prize winners were:
British Open Winner: Qinmeng Zhang (7d)
6 wins: George Han (5k)

This annual championship for male-female pairs was held on the 1st and 2nd April in Strasbourg in France.

Winners were Natalia Kovaleva and Dmitry Surin from Russia winning all six games. Second were Germany’s Pei Zhou and Lukas Kraemer and third were the Russian professional siblings, Svetlana Shikshina and Ilya Shikshin.

The UK’s Joanne Leung and Bruno Poltronieri were eleventh out of 28. They beat a Slovakian and two French pairs, but lost to the Russian pros, the Romanian Pair and Ngoc-Trang Cao and Antoine Fenech of France.

Day 1 Report Day 2 Report