Foreign Tournament Report

The female members of Team GB were all on two wins after three rounds of the Women's Individual at the World Mind Sports Games. Unfortunately Vanessa Wong did not win her third game, against Osawa Maya of Japan, so ended the day in fourth place not first or second.

In the Men's, Chong Han won a second game to end the second day in 11th place of the Men's Individual. Henry Manners also had two wins.

Results

Our picture library for the WMSG 2012 is now available.

The British team did well in the first round of the Men and Women events at the World Mind Sports Games.

All three women and three of the four men won. Chong Han and Vanessa Wong are the top team players with a chance of medals. Only Andrew Simons lost his game by 7.5 against a Brazilian 3d.

Natasha Regan and Matt Cocke finished a very creditable 7th out of 24 in the European Pair Go Championship, held in Lyon, France, 2nd-3rd June 2012. They won 3 of their 6 games.

It was won with a flawless record by the Professional Russian Pair, Svetlana Shikshina and Alexandr Dinerchtein.

Results

We won our final match of the season against Denmark 3-1, meaning we will finish in 4th or 5th place, depending on the results of the other games in the final round; better than last year when we finished 7th. Watch http://pandanet-igs.com/communities/euroteamchamps/ for final details.

In round 9 Chong Han won on board 1 against Kasper Hornbæk, getting the better side of the deal in a fighting game of many trades and winning by resignation.

Des Cann beat Thomas Heshe with a nice counter attack in which what Thomas must have thought was one of Des's weak groups, ending up killing one of Thomas'. The game continued for a while but Des defended solidly and won by resignation once it was clear all his groups were safe.

Andrew Simons got off to reasonable start in his moyo game, and although Uffe Rasmussen's invading group broke out he secured a large territory.

The 33rd World Amateur has ended in Guangzhou in China.

Our winning ways came to an end this month with a 2-2 draw against Slovakia.

On board 1 Chong Han was in for a tough game against Pavol Lisy 6d, under-20 European Youth Champion in 2011. Chong had some nice attacks, but Pavol defended well and Chong didn't manage to use the attacks to reduce Pavol's left or top side moyos, leaving him short of points. The ending was rather unfortunate with Chong resigning when a group died after filling dame.

Des Cann played his favourite high-Chinese opening again, but at a crucial moment invested another move in growing the moyo instead of helping his weak group which died. Maros Kral then killed another group and although Des made his big moyo into territory it wasn't enough and he resigned.

Andrew Simons' game against Marian Hrdina started fairly peacefully and featured a textbook invasion at the top right, but was then plunged into fighting with several trades.

We followed up last month's first victory of the season with a 4-0 win against Slovenia.

Chong Han on board 1 was again the first to finish, beating Leon Matoh. Chong captured some key stones early on after cutting a 2-space jump, though Leon did get some compensation. Unperturbed, Leon made the same 2-space jump soon after and Chong cut it in the same way again to build yet more thickness. He extended his lead through a series of attacks (though at one point attacked without first defending a weakness, but was lucky Leon missed the empty triangle tesuji which exploited it) and won by resignation once two desperate invasions of his territory were cleanly killed.

Des Cann also played a thick game and although he failed to kill a rather wobbly group the resulting wall was enough to turn large parts of Gregor Butala's moyo into Des's territory.

Csaba Mero, 6d Hungary, won the European Cup event in Dublin. This year the Irish Open was the Confucius Cup, because of a new sponsor. Second with four wins out of five was Guochen Xie, 6d China. Kim Ouweleen, 3d Amsterdam, was third and Chu Lu, 4d Warwick, was fourth, both on 3 wins. Taken the fifth place and final grand prix place was Vit Brunner, 4d Brno. Winning four games were Diana Blaszczyk, 4k Warsaw, Frank Tan, 9k Dublin, Marek Gutkowski, 9k Warsaw, and Paul Kelly, 11k Belfast. The British player with most wins, three, was Patrick Ridley, 10k Chester. Prior to the event on the Friday evening was the Irish Rapid won this time by Julien Renaud, 1d France.

Results Rapid Results

It's round 6; we're still seeking a win and now we're playing the second team in the League, Finland, relegated from Division 1 last year, so it's going to be tough.

Chong Han leads off with a quickish victory on Board 1. He's always in control and, despite missing several opportunities in the middle game to force a resignation, wins by the large margin of 17.5 points.

Des Cann had a tough game and let a few stones too many die in the middle game, losing by 8.5 in the end.

Jon Diamond on Board 3 was always in charge, squeezing a weak group leading to cutting off some other stones that he'd had his eyes on from early on in the game. His opponent ran into time troubles and eventually resigned.

The final game, and also last to finish, was the team captain's, Andrew Simons. Despite, as he says, "making what must have been 50 points of mistakes in byo yomi", he won narrowly, by 1.5 points.

So we rounded up with a close win and our first this season.