UK Tournament Report

Yicheng Xiao (6d UCL) won all his games to win both the Open and the Lightning at the fourth Not the London Open. He won all six games in the 58-player Open, whilst Fang Chun (6d Edinburgh) only lost to the winner to take second and Yiyang Ding (5d) was third by tie-break. To win the Sunday evening lightning he had to beat Scott Cobbold in the final.

For the first time in 65 years the British Congress was held in Northern Ireland, in the Maldron City Hotel in Belfast. 47 players made the journey, including nine from south of the border due to the efforts of the Irish Go Association. Thanks must go to the IGA, who provided the kit for the event, to Tiberiu Gociu, who did much of the local legwork before and during the event, and to Toby Manning and Colin Williams for running the two tournaments.

The second Go event in this year's Mind Sports Olympiad Grand Prix was the 9x9 event played online on OGS over a Sunday afternoon. There were 24 players from 35k to 6d with a large geographic spread. The Gold medal winner from Hong Kong was Yat Hin Yorkson Cheung. Silver went to Ho Yeung Woo and Bronze to Jonas Welticke. Junior Medal winners were Ryan Zhang, Andrew Volovich and Julia Volovich. Results

For the second time this year an event in Cambridge had to close its entry list some days before because of high demand to play. This year's Trigantius, played as last year at St Philip's Church Centre, had 79 players of whom 23 were juniors. Because of a problem with one of the top player's registrations there were 9 players above the 4d bar and it ended up with two of them unbeaten.

After holding the Mind Sports Olympiad (MSO) online in 2020 and 2021, it was decided to continue with an online games festival each winter to balance the actual MSO each August. The second such MSO Grand Prix, as it is called, started in February 2023 and features two Go events. The first of these was the 19x19 which attracted 45 players. Because of the large increase in players, up from 11 to 45, it was run as a McMahon not a Swiss. It was nice to see a lot of juniors taking part, including a large group from Turkey, and indeed one of the juniors nearly won one of the medals.

The inaugural Lancaster Go Tournament was held at Lancaster University on Saturday 18th February, writes organiser Marco Praderio. At 49 players, with players ranging all the way from 5d to 30k, it ended up being the largest tournament “in the North” since at least 2016 (British Opens not included). We were especially pleased to welcome 16 players attending their very first tournament!

There were 38 players including 17 juniors at the British Small Board (13x13) Championship in The Old library of Pembroke College, Cambridge. More players wanted to enter, but they were restricted by the room capacity!

The winner was Changhao Huang (5d) who won the £50 cash prize and gets to keep the trophy until next year. In second place was the previous champion Tunyang Xie (5d). Both are shown here. Zhichen Zhou (10k) won a special prize for 5 wins.

The 48th London Open ended in a tie. So many of the 70 players were strong that the bar was at 5 dan and the three best players ran out of sensible opponents for the last round. As a consequence the players and organisers agreed that no arbitary tie-break would be applied in the case of a draw. In the end one of the three lost and it was two players, Minseong Kim (7d Korea) and Yaoling Yang (6d Bristol), that were declared joint winners, both on 6/7. Chun Fang (5d Edinburgh) had to be content with third place on 5/7.

Those not reported here already:

Confucius Cup (Irish Open), Dublin - 24th-25th September - 39 players
Winner Stanislaw Frejlak (1p Poland).
Second Dohyup Kim (7d Korea).
Results

Sheffield - 9th October - 20 players
Winner Alvina Kwok (1d London).
Second Richard Wheeldon (1d London).
3/3 Bjorn Eurenius (7k Lancaster),
Steve Andrews (13k, Lincoln).
Results