The 2014 Irish Go Congress occurred over the weekend on 14th -16th February, with 44 players attending in a surprisingly sunny Dublin. Celebrating 25 years of Go in Ireland, the main tournament, the 3rd Confucius Cup, was well represented with a strong field of players.

Fan Hui (2p France) won with a perfect 5/5 score. 2nd, 3rd, and 4th places all had three wins with the order decided with SOS, resulting in Csaba Mero (6d Hungary) in second place, Antoine Fenech (5d France) third, and Ondrej Silt (6d Czech Republic) fourth.

As we have already announced we are pleased to receive two professionals from the Nihon Ki-in to the UK, with the assistance of the The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation.

They will be visiting Oxford and Bognor Regis. Chizu Kobayashi will then go on to visit London and Edinburgh.

The Professionals

Kobayashi Chizu (小林　千寿), 5 dan, born 28th September 1954 in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture. She is the sister of several professionals and was a student of the very famous Minoru Kitani and became 1 dan in 1972, 2 dan in 1973, 3 dan in 1974, 4 dan in 1976 and 5 dan in 1978.

As we have already announced we are pleased to receive two professionals from the Nihon Ki-in to the UK, with the assistance of the The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation.

They will be visiting Oxford and Bognor Regis. Chizu Kobayashi will then go on to visit London and Edinburgh.

The Professionals

Kobayashi Chizu (小林　千寿), 5 dan, born 28th September 1954 in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture. She is the sister of several professionals and was a student of the very famous Minoru Kitani and became 1 dan in 1972, 2 dan in 1973, 3 dan in 1974, 4 dan in 1976 and 5 dan in 1978.

As we have already announced we are pleased to receive two professionals from the Nihon Ki-in to the UK, with the assistance of the The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation.

They will be visiting Oxford and Bognor Regis. Chizu Kobayashi will then go on to visit London and Edinburgh.

The Professionals

Kobayashi Chizu (小林　千寿), 5 dan, born 28th September 1954 in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture. She is the sister of several professionals and was a student of the very famous Minoru Kitani and became 1 dan in 1972, 2 dan in 1973, 3 dan in 1974, 4 dan in 1976 and 5 dan in 1978.

We'd like to apologise for the excessive delay, but the minutes of the 2013 AGM are now finally available online, via the Members Area.

Mark Elliot (1d Manchester) won the Cheshire Tournament. This was his first tournament for 30 years and a good test of whether his grade from the 1980s was still accurate. He beat Helen Harvey (1k Manchester) in the final of the 8-player top group. Two players of the 12-player handicap group ended on four wins. Based on CUSS tie-break (and he had also beaten the other player), the winner was the Cheshire Tournament's founder, Brian Timmins (8k Shropshire). Brian's comment on receiving his prize was "Not bad for a 78-year-old". The player in second, by the broken tie, was Ron Bell (5k Borders).

Results

In case some of you didn’t notice: due to a booking conflict at the International Students House we’ve had to change the days of the week for the Challengers League from Friday - Monday as in previous years to Saturday 24th May - Tuesday 27th May in 2014. We hope this won’t be too much of an inconvenience to you and would like feedback after the event as to whether we should keep these days of the week or revert to Friday to Monday (subject to room availability obviously).

The British Championship entry fee will remain as it has for the last few years at £25, with something new this year: the entry fee those entitled to BGA concessionary membership will be £10.

Also new this year we are considering offering assistance with travel expenses to those in financial difficulty.

Thanks to John Collins we now have a new system to handle online Registration for our Tournaments. This does not handle any payments, but allows anyone to enter a tournament using a simple online form, provide an ICS calendar entry and also look at the list of publicly available entrants.

This system is available as a free service to any Tournament Organiser who is a BGA member.

It provides a number of options for specifying different classes of entrants, early booking discounts etc. and provides the organiser with the full list of entrants as well as a file suitable for direct import into Godraw to potentially make the draw for the first round of the tournament. Tournaments can be created from scratch, by cloning another one, e.g.

Already our discounted accommodation has sold out and Butlins own discounted rate ends today, 4th February. We are sorry that accommodation is selling fast but the warm UK weather is encouraging people to take winter holidays in the UK!

Latest advice on accommodation is at http://www.britgo.org/eygc2014/accommodation with options for parties of 4 or 6.

If you are a single or a couple then there are various hotels in Bognor and also guest houses, but some of these are running low on availability (some links from out accommodation page).

So far we've received more than 60 entries for these three events, but it's a little disappointing that we don't have any UK players in the Under-20 Championship yet, especially with the prize of a trip to the World Under-20 Championship in Japan.

The entries we do have for the Under-20 range from 2 dan to 6 dan in strength, so it's definitely going to be a challenging tournament for any entrant.

We'd like to see more UK players in all the events, so if you know of someone young who might like to play (there's no entry fee) please get in contact with them and persuade them to come along.