Foreign Tournament Report

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.

We went into our match this week hoping to get our first win of the season, Switzerland being one of the weaker teams who were promoted from the C league.

On 1st board was new team member Chong Han. He played an unconventional, centre-oriented opening which lead to complex fighting and many chances for both to win, but in the end he lost by a few points.

On board two Des Cann started powerfully and looked on course for a crushing victory until he blundered some key cutting stones, but fortunately he battled on and won anyway. Alex Selby also won his relatively peaceful game.

Finally, Andrew Simons lost his game when he played a time tesuji to read if a group could be killed by ko or unconditionally and then forgot to kill it afterwards.

The Swiss team kindly let us join reviews of the games the next evening by their trainer, Hwang In-seong 7d. So another draw and our first win of the season remains elusive.

Yet another loss in the Pandanet European Championship...

The two newcomers to our team did not have a good time - Bei Ge losing a very close game on the first board against the top Israeli Ali Jabarin, actually playing from Korea where we think he's undergoing some Baduk training, and David Ward on last board struggling with using Pandanet for the first time, also losing.

Jon Diamond screwed up again, first playing at a wrong point and his opponent then unable to Undo the move (poor user interface perhaps?) and finally missing an obvious snapback when in a good position.

Unfortunately Andrew Simons was unable to recover the situation on his own but did win his game, just like last year. So a 3:1 loss, just like last year...

The full season's results and games are here.

China were unbeaten in all five matches to win the team event at the first SportAccord World Mind Games in Beijing. They beat Europe, Taiwan and finally the US 5-0; in round 2 they had beaten Korea 3-2 and in round 4 had beaten Japan 4-1. Second place went to Korea who only lost to China and beat Japan in the last round 4-1. This made Japan take the third place. Fourth was Chinese Taipei on two wins, fifth was USA and sixth Europe. Both USA and Europe only won games against each other, the result being 3-2 to USA in round 3. The UK's Vanessa Wong was playing for Europe on board 5 and next would be playing in the Pair Go event with Catalin Taranu.

23 players graced Cork with their presence this year. The tournament took place in the rather beautiful main campus of University College Cork. Top of the bunch was Kim Ouweleen, 3d, from Amsterdam, with a perfect 5/5. In second place was Ian Davis, 1d, who edged out Spain's Matei Garcia, 4k, on tiebreak, despite his 5/5 score. Also scoring 5/5 was Thomas Shanahan, 15k, from Galway. With 4/5 were Arthur Cater, 9k, Marek Gutkoswki, 10k, and Kevin Doherty 15k.

Results

The British Pair of Alison and Simon Bexfield topped the group on 2 wins to come 17th in the 22nd IAPGC. They beat pairs from Philippines and Spain, but lost to Korea and two Japanese pairs. For the 6th time in a row Korea won, with Chinese Taipei in second this time. The top European pairs were Hungary in 9th and Czechia in 12th, both with 3 wins.

Results