UK Tournament Report

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!

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

It was good to resume the Northern after the two year pandemic break by returning to Cheadle Hulme School on Sunday 20th November. Sizeable contingents from Sheffield University and Lancaster added to the pupils at the school and others to bring the total attendance to 32. The overall winner was Junlin Lei, 5d from Lancaster, shown here on the right receiving his prize. Zhang Wei, 5d from Manchester, was in second place.

The Swindon Tournament was back on and at its usual Conservative Club venue in the old town part of Swindon. 21 players took part, with a small top group of 3d and above. In the end there was no unique winner as three Chinese players all beat each other. Unfortunately for Changhao Huang (5d UCL) his SOS was one point worse than the other two, so Oxford University's Guodong Cao (4d) and UCL's Peikai Xue (4d) tied for first. Jonathan Evans (1d) was the only player to win three games and got the only prize below the bar. Results

Congratulations go to Zeyu Qiu (5d, Birmingham) who won the Edinburgh Open Tournament 2022 with three wins from three games. Also on three wins was Florian Pein (13k, Lancaster); prizes also went to everyone on two wins. Results

The Mind Sports Olympiad returned to being a physical event and was held at the usual venue of the JW3, a community centre on London's Finchley Road. Remarkably this year half of the 26 players in the MSO Go Open (19x19) tournament were juniors and as well most of the adults were Chinese students. A view of part of the playing room is above.