UK Tournament Report

The 2023 Durham Go Tournament was held in Elvet Hill House, next to the Oriental Museum, as has become traditional over the last few years. This year Andrew was able to be there in person to help with the organisation, having not contracted Covid!

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 Chun Fang (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 delayed 2022 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!