After our unfortunate forfeit against the Netherlands last month (we forgot to turn up), we were up against Poland this month.

On board 1 Andrew Simons was looking forward to getting his revenge against Marek Kamiński whom he had narrowly lost to at the Polish Go Summer Camp last year (http://lsg.go.art.pl), but Marek didn't show up so he won by forfeit.

Played the night before, Des Cann was in for a tough match against young talent Stanisław Frejlak who won the Polish Championship last year. Fighting soon broke out in the opening, with his groups getting cut in bad shape and some sharp moves from Stanisław brought down too many groups so Des resigned.

Martha McGill's game against Roman Pszonka also had a lot of running fights with weak groups, but unfortunately the dead groups were once again British so she resigned.

Henry Clay scored a good win against Sebastian Pawlaczyk in his debut for the team.

Toby Manning, 2d Leicester, won the 2013 Cheshire Open. He beat Tony Atkins, 1d Reading, in the final. Also winning 2/3 were Roger Huyshe, 3k Shropshire, and Chris Kirkham, 4k Manchester. In the 14 player Handicap section Dave Horan, 9k Chester, was the winner with 5/5, narrowly winning his last game on time. Winning 4/5 were Brian Timmins, 8k Shropshire, and John Green, 4k Leamington. Winning the fighting spirit prize was Gary Ashworth, 4k Manchester.

Results Report with pictures

38 players braved the snowy conditions to attend the Maidenhead Tournament. Winner was Matthew Cocke, 5d, from Epsom. Also winning all 3 games were Paul Margetts, 3k Epsom, Malcolm Hagan, 7k, Winchester, and Robert Scantlebury, 8k Sheffield. 13x13 winner was Rebecca Margetts, 35k Epsom. Epsom also won the team prize with 9/12. Joe Doyle, 11k, was awarded a prize too, for getting a jigo at his first ever tournament.

Results

This summarises the major discussions and actions from the BGA Council meetings 13th October and 2nd December 2012 and preceding discussions:

Congratulations to the Edinburgh team on winning the fourth season of the BGA Online League held during most of 2012.

The contest in Division 1 was extremely close, with each team winning and losing 9 games apiece.

Lukas Kraemer unbeaten in London Open

Lukas Kraemer, 5d from Bonn, won the London Open with a perfect 7 out of 7. Second was the UK's own Matthew Cocke, 5d, who only lost to Lukas. The third player to win European Cup points was Volkmar Liebscher, 3d, from Germany who topped the group on 5 wins on tie break from Lucian Nicolaie, 2d, from Romania. Next placed was David Armel-Wolff, 4d Zurich, who won 5/5.

Winning 6/7 was Joerg Sonnenberger (6k Rostock). Winning 5/7 were Boris Mitrovic (2k Edinburgh), Michael Plikk (3k Oslo), Laurence Ogden (4k Manchester), Timofey Arsenov (4k Russia), Carl Roll (5k Nottingham), Richard Wheeldon (6k South London) and Marwan Jabbour (8k Ouest Parisien). 103 players took part.

Results

Guo Juan, the teaching pro at the London Open, won the London Pair Go Tournament again. This time she played with French 6k Claude Brisson. They beat Andrew Kay, 4d, and Klaudia Kleczkowska, 1k from Poland, in the finals. 16 pairs took part in the event held on the second evening of the London Open.

Results
Gallery

UK's Vanessa Wong was part of the European team at the 2nd SportAccord World Mind Games in Beijing. In the Women's event she lost to Choi Jeong 2p of Korea, beat Rita Pocsai 5d from Hungary and lost to Natalia Kovaleva 5d from Russia. She also played Pair Go with Jan Hora of Czechia. They lost to Joanne Missingham and Lin Chih-han of Chinese Taipei and then to Irene Sha and Bill Lin of Canada.

The Women's was won by Li He of China and the Men's by Choi Chulhan of Korea. Choi also won the Pair Go playing with Choi Jeong.

Full results (off-site)

Read an interview with her

After last year's wobble, the Edinburgh Christmas Open has made a full recovery. The 2012 event was attended by a healthy 32 players at an excellent venue, only a stone's throw from the station and with home baking laid on by local organisers Martha and Matt. William Grayson (9k Durham) was the only player with 4 wins. Prizes for 3 wins below the bar went to Arthur Geddes (4k Glasgow), Andrew Thurman (7k Durham), John Shafer (7k Durham), Greg Cox (10k Dundee), Sam Sowden-Garcia (12k Durham), David Barnes (17k Edinburgh). From the five players at the top all on 3 wins, the SOS tiebreak gave the whisky to David Lee (3d Dundee). The following three players on the same SOS performed nigiri for the one remaining prize which went to Jakub Ziomko (1d Poland) over Piotr Wisthal (1d Aberdeen) and Andrew Simons (3d Cambridge).

Results

The day after the tournament, twelve players gathered together for a day of studying.

Our disappointing start this season continues... so badly that we are now bottom of the League with only one draw from four matches!

We are still seeking our first win of the season after a disappointing 1-3 loss to Norway. However, the match was much closer than the result shows.

This was the first game this season that Jon Diamond took the top board and he was facing a tough opponent in Jie Lin Xia 5d. Despite managing to save his weak group after playing tenuki several times, he didn't have enough points and had to resign after some stones got cut off in the yose.

Andrew Simons had a comfortable lead against Øystein Vestgården after making a decisive cut to capture some stones and was playing to simply seal the win, but then embarked on a crazy adventure which resulted in a bad trade which made the game close again.