UK Tournament Report

The Edinburgh Open was again held at the "St Columba's by the Castle" Episcopal Church Hall. This year, nice weather meant they could use the garden of the church hall as a review space. Overall turnout was up on last year with 29 players and pleasingly included three first-time tournament players.

The bar was set at 2k, which made for a very competitive field of seven players who could win the competition. Local player Grzegorz Kudla (2k) won the tournament with three wins from three games, following a tense final game with Ai Guan (Birmingham 1k).

The 27th Mind Sports Olympiad (MSO) took place in its regular venue of the JW3 centre in London. As usual a large number of games fans from around the world, including this time a large team of Koreans, assembled to play a long and varied list of games. Some Go players competed in several games: Ai Guan, Paul Smith and Caleb Monk; Natasha Regan was the Women's Pentamind champion. Details of all MSO results are on the MSO Database.

On 24-25 June, the switch back to Barmouth's Dragon Theatre proved popular with the 30 attendees, who took advantage of a rare whole-weekend tournament on the BGA calendar. The theatre was the tournament's very first venue in the seaside town, back in 1993. It felt good for the event to be supporting a fine, renovated community amenity, for this 29th edition.

The weather was mixed, but there were chances to climb the cliffs for views of the town, its wide bay and the start of Snowdonia national park's scenic mountainous region.

The Cheshire, which had been postponed from March because of a train strike, took place on Saturday 1st July at Frodsham Community Centre. North-west clubs were well represented: Liverpool club provided five of the 32 players, Manchester eight players, Lancaster four players and Chester four players.

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