With regret we report that Allan Scarff, pioneer Go programmer, died from cancer on 9th December 2011, aged 65.

Allan first came across Go in 1969, when working as a programmer with NCR in Dundee, from a Pure Science student friend, Phil Bristow. Go immediately captured his interest and he was soon teaching it to anybody and everybody, including his family, of whom son Christian still plays regularly.

In 1970, with a wife and three children to support, he got a job with ICL in Reading, and joined the existing Go club which he helped run for some years whilst reaching dan level. He left ICL in 1983 to work for himself, but stayed in Reading.

Allan had what he called a cellular automaton idea to produce a Go program which could run on a small PC like BBC Acorn. Microgo1 came on the market in 1984 and Microgo2 followed; it won places in various competitions between 1985 and 1989.

We went into our match this week hoping to get our first win of the season, Switzerland being one of the weaker teams who were promoted from the C league.

On 1st board was new team member Chong Han. He played an unconventional, centre-oriented opening which lead to complex fighting and many chances for both to win, but in the end he lost by a few points.

On board two Des Cann started powerfully and looked on course for a crushing victory until he blundered some key cutting stones, but fortunately he battled on and won anyway. Alex Selby also won his relatively peaceful game.

Finally, Andrew Simons lost his game when he played a time tesuji to read if a group could be killed by ko or unconditionally and then forgot to kill it afterwards.

The Swiss team kindly let us join reviews of the games the next evening by their trainer, Hwang In-seong 7d. So another draw and our first win of the season remains elusive.

Andrew Simons won the slightly delayed 2011 British Small Board Championship to hold on to his title won in 2010, by beating Tim Hunt, despite losing to him in their first game. Unfortunately though Andrew still has not received the trophy as the delay in passing it on last time was repeated when the organiser brought the wrong trophy along. Nevertheless all else was organised well, including the cooking by Paul Smith's family. Youth prize winner was Melchior Chui who won all 8 games. Best Junior was Anthony Ghica with 6/8, and best under-8 player was Edmund Smith. Other junior prizes went to Peran Truscott and David Robson. Also winning prizes were Andrea Smith and Stanislaw Klajn.

Results

Xinyi Lu, former organiser, was remembered at the 2012 Maidenhead Tournament. The tournament was honoured by the presence of both Xinyi's parents and several family friends. 49 players took part in the tournament and it was fitting that it was a Chinese player, Chu Lu 5d, who was the winner. She beat Bei Ge in the final. Also winning three were Mike Charles, 2k, and Dave Storkey, 8k.

Happy New Year to all our members and other Go players

The BGA is continuing its regular activities, such as Membership Administration, the Youth Grand Prix and the BGJ, however Council has been discussing what and how to prioritise our development activities for 2012 and this is what we've come up with:

Club Development

Quite a number of our clubs are just about hanging on, a few have given up recently and some are reported as not being terribly friendly to novices.

We will be focussing on trying to spread best practice from the active clubs to less active ones. We also be trying other methods of encouraging clubs not just to play more, but also to recruit and teach new players.

We also need to know what the BGA can additionally provide to help clubs.

The London Open kicked off with more than 100 players from 23 countries in round one and more than 120 players in total. On hand to do teaching was Korean Professional Miss Ko Juyeong. On the second evening the 16 team Pair Go was won by Ko Juyeong and Chong Han.

After 5 rounds Korean 7d Young-Sam Kim was unbeaten, close behind were Yunlong Liu 3d from China and British players Chong Han 5d and Andrew Kay 4d.

In the end nobody could beat Young-Sam Kim who took the first place. Five players ended on five wins in the next positions: Lingjun Miao (4d China), Yunlong Liu (3d China), Chong Han (5d, UK), Andrew Kay (4d UK) and Ching-Nung Lin (6d Taiwan). The second-third and fourth-fifth places were tied. Winning six games were Rafael Mello (11k Durham), Carl Roll (7k Nottingham) and Martha McGill (2k Edinburgh). All players with five wins got a prize selected from the prize table and all with four wins got a certificate.

The third season of the online team league and the first season of the online Individual League concluded on 17th December 2011.

After some adjustments, awarding draws in unplayed games, the winners of the online team league, taking the GoGoD shield, were Central London Go Club A.

Winning Division 2 and promotion to division 1 were St Albans Go Club team.

Winning Division 3 and promotion to division 2 were the Chester A team.

Winning Division 4 and promotion to division 3 were the South London team.

The individual league prizes in the first online league were named the "Xinyi Lu prizes" in honour of Xinyi Lu, who tragically died in October 2011.

Winning Division 1 was Andrew Simons from Cambridge.

Winning Division 2 - and what would have been promotion to division 1 - was Xinyi Lu from the Central London Go Club.

Winning Division 3 and promotion to division 2 was John Collins from the St Albans Go Club.

Coming bottom of their respective divisions and relegate

Yet another loss in the Pandanet European Championship...

The two newcomers to our team did not have a good time - Bei Ge losing a very close game on the first board against the top Israeli Ali Jabarin, actually playing from Korea where we think he's undergoing some Baduk training, and David Ward on last board struggling with using Pandanet for the first time, also losing.

Jon Diamond screwed up again, first playing at a wrong point and his opponent then unable to Undo the move (poor user interface perhaps?) and finally missing an obvious snapback when in a good position.

Unfortunately Andrew Simons was unable to recover the situation on his own but did win his game, just like last year. So a 3:1 loss, just like last year...

The full season's results and games are here.

China were unbeaten in all five matches to win the team event at the first SportAccord World Mind Games in Beijing. They beat Europe, Taiwan and finally the US 5-0; in round 2 they had beaten Korea 3-2 and in round 4 had beaten Japan 4-1. Second place went to Korea who only lost to China and beat Japan in the last round 4-1. This made Japan take the third place. Fourth was Chinese Taipei on two wins, fifth was USA and sixth Europe. Both USA and Europe only won games against each other, the result being 3-2 to USA in round 3. The UK's Vanessa Wong was playing for Europe on board 5 and next would be playing in the Pair Go event with Catalin Taranu.

At the request of the Brazilian Go Association we have given them permission to translate into Portuguese articles from the British Go Journal, with appropriate acknowledgements. This will help them popularise the game in Brazil, where the 2016 World Mind Sports Games is scheduled to be held.

Hopefully this will also help promote Go in Portugal, Mozambique, Angola and other Portuguese-speaking countries.

We understand that other South American countries, although Spanish speaking, are also interested in this project.