Photos by Tom Coulthard, Alice Ambrose-Thurman and Chizu Kobayashi

On Saturday 11th October Durham Go Club ran a teaching event at Durham Oriental Museum, as part of their Festival of Japan - celebrating the teaching of Japanese at the University of Durham. The Japanese Embassy kindly sponsored Chizu Kobayashi-san, a 5d Japanese professional, to come to Durham to assist with this.

Kobayashi-san taught a range of people, from some of our stronger club dan players to complete beginners. We had around 20 club members turn out for the event to teach members of the public - most of whom had never come across Go before.

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Jon Diamond seems to only win the East Midlands in even years, so having won in 2010 and 2012, he was back as champion in 2014. He was one of several BGA council members in the Leicester area for the weekend, as there was a council meeting on the Sunday.

The only other player on three wins was Edwina Lee (Maidenhead).

32 players took part.

As the main organiser fell ill, the full results were delayed.

Results

Game 2 of the best of five title match for the British Championship was played on Sunday 12th October in Milton Keynes, the day after game 1.

Current champion Andrew Kay played white against Alex Kent and won by resignation at about 15:30 to give him a 2-0 lead in the best-of-five match.

The game was again broadcast in the British Room of KGS (gokgs.com) by BGAadmin.

Photos

Details of British Go Championship

Game 1 of the best of five title match for the British Championship was played on Saturday 11th October in Milton Keynes. Current champion Andrew Kay from Birmingham played black against Alex Kent from Chepstow, starting at 10:00 with a break for lunch (at a ramen restaurant).

The game was broadcast in the British Room of KGS (gokgs.com). Andrew won by resignation at about 15:30

Photos

Details of British Go Championship

As part of its Festival of Japan, Durham Oriental Museum are running a Go teaching event with Durham Go Club on Saturday 11th October 1pm-5pm. The Japanese Embassy have organised for 5d pro Chizu Kobayashi to come, and the event is free and open to all.

There should be teaching appropriate for a wide range of strengths, from complete beginners upwards, including members of the public. Anyone who would like to come to Durham for the event - whether to learn or to help teach - will be more than welcome.

More details are at https://www.dur.ac.uk/oriental.museum/whatson/details/?id=21600

The autumn edition of the London International Teams stayed at the Melton Mowbray pub and again on a Saturday, but this time the teams had five players.

A North London Go Club player raised a team of players from around London to defend the title. They managed to win all three matches, by three boards to two, to retain the trophy.

The other three teams each won a match and the order on games won was second Wanstead, third Nippon and fourth SLGC from South London.

As usual all players won a prize but those especially noted for winning all three games were Aja Huang (6d), Shunsuke Sakairi (3d) and Roger Daniel (5k).

Our first match in the new season of the C League was against Greece, one of the newest Go countries in Europe. We won it 3-1, to end the day at the top of the league alongside Bulgaria and just above Lithuania, who both also won 3-1.

1. Des Cann (B) beat Konstantinos Michailidis (Crates, 1k) by 32.5 sgf
2. Paul Taylor (W) beat Dimitrios Satkas (notevenbad, 5 kyu) by resignation sgf
3. Toby Manning (B) beat Harris Lambrakis (Drugon, 5 kyu ) by resignation sgf
4. Jonathan Gallimore (W) lost to Dionisios Sema (Mathsnails, 7 kyu) by 41.5 sgf

Our League Page for 2014-2015 with sgf links

Update: Croatia - Kazakhstan ended a day late as a 4-0, pushing UK down to equal second.

Due to some scammers using our britgo.org domain name a few weeks ago we've been having some problems with people trying to contact us and various people through our website. This also applies to registrations to the London Open this year.

Unfortunately, the problem has led to some ISPs dropping emails from us without notification, so we're not aware of exactly which emails are not being received.

Sadly, despite our efforts, we can't be sure that all ISPs have unbanned us, so if you don't receive a response within a week please feel free to try to contact the person via an alternative route (including using a phone!) or escalate your request to someone else directly.

We'd like to apologise for this problem and hope it doesn't affect you too much.

Jitka Bartova (1d) was visiting the UK from Prague for a weekend with her friend Ngoc-Trang Cao who is a current member of Leamington Club. Luckily John Green could give them both a lift to the Swindon Tournament, so Jitka could promote the 2015 European Go Congress in Liberec and also win the tournament, to make a perfect weekend away.

Simon Shiu had stopped Ngoc-Trang from winning another event in round one, but Simon lost to Jitka in round two. This lead to a final-round clash with Bristol's Richard Hunter (2d), the only other top player on two wins. The game was the last to finish and ended equal on the board, but Jitka held the white stones to win by the komi. Her win, plus two wins by her friend and two wins by her driver, meant that Leamington was the best club.