UK News

It is with deep sadness that we have to announce the death of T Mark Hall on Monday after a long illness.

T Mark was a long and faithful servant of the British Go Association, of British Go in general and of World Go through his partnership with John Fairbairn in GoGoD (Games of Go on Disk). He was on our Council for some 22 years, serving for 20 of these as Treasurer, a record of service that will surely be unsurpassed.

He was a fine player, especially at Lightning Go, and won many tournaments, although never quite challenging for the final of the British Championship. His last tournament appearance was in the British Open in April this year when he came 4th.

We are pleased to announce that the online Korean Go Server, is sponsoring an Oxford vs Cambridge Match at the London Open.

The match, which will be shown online on the WBaduk server, will be on the evening of December 30.

Each team will have 4 members: two current students, and 2 alumni.

More information is available at the LOGC page

We are very grateful to WBaduk for their financial support making this match possible.

We're up to three wins out of three now in the European Team Championship. This month our match was against Iceland.

All of the matches were comfortable wins this time, giving us a good 4-0 scoreline to put us top of our division once more. On board 1, Andrew Simons made things a little edgy towards the end but was ahead by so much that a win was still assured. Meanwhile on board 4, while the other games still had only around 10-20 moves played, Henry Manners and his opponent went off to the pub having played the entire game (1 hour each + 25 stones in 10 minutes Canadian byo-yomi) each using around 10 minutes! Who needs to think to win by almost 100 anyway...

Les Bock has finally retired as our Archivist after many years in the position.

The Archive is in the process of being transferred to our new Archivist, Barry Chandler, and we'd like to thank Les for his untold years of service.

After a successful start to the season last month against Greece, our UK team played Switzerland in round 2 of the European Team Championship on Tuesday.

Switzerland are one of the toughest teams in our league, but our strongest players stepped up and we managed to secure a great 3-1 victory, including a half-point win by Des Cann on board 2.

British Go Journal 161 is now available publicly and 165 is now available to BGA members online as well as in print.

The European Team Championship started on Tuesday 17th September. Our first match was against Greece.

Greece's team entered was quite a bit weaker than ours, so this was a match we really needed to win if we were to hope for promotion again to the B league after being relegated last season. Thankfully our team came through, and we got off to a great 4-0 start. The game records are available below in the 'sgf' links.

Our second match is against Switzerland on 22nd October, 8pm UK time. Please do come along and support the team if you're around - always nice to get support and the matches are high quality.

The Chinese professional and Vice-Chairman of the Chinese Weiqi Association, Wang Runan (8p), visited the British Museum on Saturday 7th September. He spoke to a lecture theatre containing nearly 100 people interested in Chinese Culture, including some British Go players, on the subject of Weiqi (Go) in Chinese Culture. In particular, Mr Wang is keen to get the very early Go manual held by the British Library, the Dunhuang Go Manual, returned to China.

He then played simultaneous games against players from the BGA: Matthew Cocke, Michael Webster, Baoliang Zhang and Oscar Selby. Francis Roads gave a commentary on the Cocke game which was projected on a screen for all to watch.

We now have agreement to hold a stall at the Mind Sports Festival in Cardiff on September 14-15th. This will be run by the British Go Association in conjunction with the Cardiff Go Club.

There is some information about this and other Mind Sports Festivals here: http://www.mindsportsfestivals.com.

The Festival will host competitions for (currently): Chess, Scrabble and Magic, with about 400 registered competitors so far.

We expect to have good opportunities to promote Go to like-minded people during the Festival, when they have intervals in their play or are knocked out.

The London Go Picnic held on Sunday 21st July was very successful. Despite the heatwave the sun was not too bright and there were plenty of trees in St James' Park to hide under and there was always the trip to the pub, for more games afterwards, to allow players to quench their thirsts.