Foreign Tournament Report

Matthew Macfadyen had lost to Dusan Mitic, one of the undefeated Mitic brothers, by resignation the previous Wednesday, so we knew that we were up against it - the team we were able to put out against the Serbians was nominally slightly weaker than our opponents.

Despite some Serbian confusion as to the start time, sadly Nikola remained undefeated also, edging Bei Ge by just 0.5 points! So we were saved by Des Cann and Jon Diamond’s close victories on boards 3 and 4. (Jon was especially lucky having 'lost' the game several times, finally living with an L group and then killing one of the surrounding groups!)

Phew - the closest result in the round, perhaps the closest ever?

We're still near the bottom of the table, but a win in our next round could lift us to 3rd place as only two teams have won more than one match.

League Results 2011-12

Andrew Kay, representing the UK, placed 22nd in the 6th KPMC in Pohang Korea. He beat Morocco, Slovenia and Hong Kong, but lost to France, Canada and Thailand to win 3/6. Also winning 3/6 below the dan-bar was Ireland's Rory Wales in 49th place.

Results (off-site)

The British team lost their first match in the new season of the. Pandanet Go European Team Championship. Their B-League fixture against Belgium ended as a 3-1 defeat. The team of Bei Ge, Des Cann, Alex Selby and Andrew Simons battled hard, but only won on board 4.

Vanessa Wong beat Svetlana Shikshina in the last round of the SportAccord Qualifier in Prague to get the women's place on the European Union team for Beijing in December. She will play Pair Go with Catalin Taranu. The other team members will be Cornel Burzo, Christian Pop and Ilya Shikshin.

Vanessa won three games in all including a win over Matthew Macfadyen who ended on two wins.

Results

Russian 7 dan Ilya Shikshin retained the European Championship by beating Catalin Taranu in the final. This year the top 8 placed Europeans played knockout after round 7 which gave to an exciting final on the last day. Winning the play-off for third was Ukraine's Artem Kachanovskyi, who beat Alexandr Dinerchtein. Top British player was Vanessa Wong who won seven games to place 22nd, including beating Israeli 6 dan Ali Jabarin in the last round. Michael Webster (1 kyu) and Patrick Ridley (10 kyu) both won 6 games out of 10. Korea's Young-Sam Kim was the Open champion. 757 players took part.

Sang-Youn Jeon, 7 dan Korea, won the 435-player weekend tournament. Rita Pocsai / Jan Simara won the Pair Go and Russia won the finals of the Pandanet European Team Go Championships.

Results

Natasha Regan and Matthew Cocke took 11th place (the 9th best country) at the European Pair Go Championship in Istanbul, Turkey. They lost to Czechia, France and Germany, but beat Poland and two pairs from Turkey. Best of the 31 pairs taking part was the pair from Hungary, Rita Pocsai and Pal Balogh. Czechia was second and Ukraine third.

Results

The UK representative at the 32nd WAGC was Alex Selby from Cambridge. He won 3 games to take 43rd place. His first game was a loss to former World Champion Hirata of Japan. He then lost to Nechanicky of Czechia and Trippel of Switzerland, before beating Neville Smythe of Australia. He then lost to Minieri of Italy, beat the player from Azerbaijan, lost to Pedersen of Denmark and won the last game against Mexico. James Hutchinson of Ireland was 36th with 4 wins against Denmark, Argentina, Portugal and Brazil. The unbeaten Champion was Bai of China. Second was Choi of Korea. The group on 6 wins were Eric Lui (USA), Thomas Debarre (France), Hirata (Japan), Jun Fan (Canada) and Franz-Josef Dickhut (Germany). 57 countries took part at the Shimane prefectural hall in Matsue, a ancient castle town in the west of Japan.

Another slightly more scratch team than usual (Matthew couldn't play again) for our final game against Spain proved more successful with a 3:1 win (probably).

The probably is because Toby was playing on Pandanet for the first time and he and his opponent failed to manage to set the time limits correctly and play their game. This game had been set up at the last minute as Spain couldn't raise a 4th board until the day of the match. So, since Toby's opponent was much weaker and would have needed to finish early in any event, he had allowed Toby the win.

In other games Andrew and Jon both gave their opponents a serious opportunity to kill significant groups, but these weren't taken, and they both captured other groups in return to win by resignation.

With a somewhat more scratch team than usual (Matthew couldn't play etc.) we lost 1-3 against Slovenia.

Thanks to Jonathan Chin for stepping up at the last minute to play board 4. He was leading with a huge centre, but then there was an unfavourable big exchange in a ko and he ended up losing by 1.5 points.

It could easily have been 3-1 the other way as Jon was also leading, but played self atari at the end. Doh...

The season is nearing its finale with only one more match to be played (vs. Spain). For more details, see the BGA Euroteams page

In the 3rd edition of the TransAtlantic Youth Go Match Vanessa Wong, representing Europe, beat Hugh Zhang (aged 14) by 10 points. Hugh took 1st place in the USA 2008 Redmond Cup Junior division and 2nd place in the 2008 US Youth Goe Championship.

This event provides the opportunity for youth players on both sides to get top-level playing experience and make new go friends. The tournament is organized as a team match with eleven players per side, with players being invited to by their national or continental go associations.

Games were played in the Transatlantic Youth Go Tournament room on the KGS go server on 17th April.

Europe won for the first time, beating the USA by 6 games to 5.

Results