Foreign Tournament Report

Despite the first appearance by Vanessa Wong on top board for our team our poor start to the season continues and we're now in the Relegation Zone for the first time.

We had another loss to the Swiss, with Bei Ge managing our solitary win by a substantial margin. Vanessa had much technical trouble starting her game (getting to grips with Pandanet for the first time can be tricky), with her playing White when it should have been Black, and lost by resignation.

A veil should be drawn over the other two games...

Full season results

Our second match of the season was against Denmark and ended in a 2-2 draw.

On board 1 Chong Han's game soon plunged into a fight when he pushed into the centre, presumably expecting his opponent to block before connecting on the edge, but Jannik Rasmussen resisted and disconnected the groups. The ensuing fight spread across the board and although all the groups survived Chong didn't have enough territory and resigned.

Jon Diamond also lost on board 2 against Uffe Rasmussen. He meant to play 131 at 132, but something happened in the client software when he played his move. He thought it was played (with 2 presses), but apparently it didn't take in some fashion and then played at a different point.

Toby Manning was our representative at the Korean Prime Minister's Cup this year. On day the first day he easily defeated the Korean "ghost", followed this with by a narrow loss (9.5 points) to Thailand and managed a close victory (1.5 points) against Denmark. On the second day he lost to New Zealand (by 1 liberty) and to Vietnam (4 1/2 points), and beat Norway, ending up with 3 out of 6.

James Hutchinson of Belfast, but playing for Ireland, also got 3 out of 6, beating Cyprus, Ecuador and Chile, and losing to France, Lithuania and Colombia.

The competition was won by Korea.

Results

The 3rd season of the Pandanet Go European Team Championship has begun, with the UK team again in League B. The team is largely the same as before, but at the top features the addition of Vanessa Wong 6d, current European Women's Champion, who will hopefully help us improve on our position of 5th place last season.

Unfortunately our campaign got off to a bad start, losing 0-4 to Austria.

Vanessa had to drop out so new team member Martha McGill stepped up to play on board 4 against Jürgen Suntinger.

Congratulations to Vanessa on her latest win, in Brno, Czech Republic!

Alison Bexfield reports that Vanessa won all five of her games and will now receive a place at the 2nd SportAccord World Mind Games in Beijing in December. It was a "great venue beside a lake."

Second was Rita Pocsai from Hungary and third was Natalia Kovaleva from Russia.

Alison finished with 2 wins from the 5 games.

Results (off-site)

On the last day of play at the World Mind Sports Games the finals and play-offs were staggered so you could watch more than one on Pandanet and EuroGoTV and so that some of the winners could catch evening flights.

The first event to end was the Pair Go. Already Chinese Taipei had stopped Russia from taking the third place, but a very interesting and hard-fought battle ensued to see if Japan could stop their other pair from getting the gold. Eventually the game ended up tied on the board with Japan winning by komi.

Gold : Japan Maya Osawa/Riki Nakasone

Silver: Chinese Taipei Lin Hsiao /Hung Hsin Wei

Bronze: Chinese Taipei Lu Yu-Hua /Lai Yu Cheng

In the Youth, Zhoa Jia Rui from Hong Kong was forced to settle for fourth place, meaning Chinese Taipei would win all three medals again.

In the Youth, Tian Ren Chen won a third game by beating a French 3d. Henry Clay lost to a Brazilian 1d to end on 2 wins. Vanessa Wong lost to a Japanese 6d to end on 2 wins and 23rd place.

Three players form Chinese Taipei and one from Hong Kong qualified for the semi-finals. Tsai Cheng-Wei beat Hong Kong's Zhao Jia Rui and Kuo Nai-Fu beat Hsu Hao-Hung.

In the Pair Go, Martha McGill and Matthew Crosby lost to the pair from Macau to end 7th in Group A with 2 wins. In their 5th round game Alison and Simon Bexfield were due to play the Brazilian pair, but ended up playing and beating a reserve pair from Austria/Germany after the Brazilians withdrew because of illness. This gave Alison and Simon 2 wins and 8th place in Group B.

In first semi-final, Russia's Natalia Kovaleva and Dmitriy Surin lost to Lin Hsiao-Tung and Hung Hsin-Wei of Chinese Taipei. In the other Japan's Osawa Maya and Nakasone Riki beat Lu Yu-Hua and Lai Yu-Cheng from Chinese Taipei.

With one round left to go Chinese Taipei were dominating the top of both the Youth and The Pair Go tournaments.

In the Pairs, Martha McGill and Matthew Crosby picked up a second win beating a Romanian pair, whilst Alison and Simon Bexfield remained on 1 win.

In the Youth, all the UK players moved on to 2 wins, despite Henry and Tian Ren having to play each other (Henry won) and Vanessa getting tough opponents (she lost to a 5d from Macau and beat a 5d from Hong Kong).

The 42 player Youth Tournament and the 20 team Pair Go Tournament got underway at the WMSG in Lille.

In the Youth, the UK players (Vanessa Wong, Henry Clay and Tian Ren Chen) all won one game out of two on the first day.

In A Group of the Pairs, Martha McGill and Matthew Crosby lost their first game against Americans and won their second against a Dutch pair. In the B Group, Alison and Simon Bexfield lost their first game to a Dutch pair and won their second against Italians.

Lai, Hung and Kuo of Chinese Taipei 1 won the gold medal in the Team Tournament. In the semi-finals they beat Singapore 3-0 and then in the final won 2-1 against Chinese Taipei 2. Chinese Taipei 2 (Lo, Tsai and Hsu) had beaten Russia 2-1 in their semi-final and had to be content with the silver medal. Singapore won the bronze medal beating Russia 2-1 in the play-off for third.