Foreign Tournament Report

After a few years in other countries, the World Amateur Go Championships has returned to Japan. The 39th edition has the restaurant review website Gurunami as its sponsor and is being held at the Nihon Ki-in in Tokyo. 61 players from around the world are taking part.

As expected after four rounds it is the big four that are unbeaten: Japan, China, Korea and Chinese Taipei. Several of the top European players are on three wins.

The UK's representative is British Champion Daniel Hu. After four out of eight rounds he has two wins and is in 26th place. He lost to Dmitry Surin of Russia, beat Jose Islas of Mexico and Stjepan Mestrovic of Croatia, and lost to Stanislaw Frejlak of Poland. He next plays the player from Norway.

Ireland's Michael Thai is on one win, having beaten Theodor Nedev of Bulgaria, but lost to the players from Denmark, Indonesia and Croatia.

A great win in the eighth round - against the strong third-place team from the Netherlands - sees the UK guaranteed at least second place in the Pandanet B League. With just Sweden to go for the UK, unless there is an upset by Turkey against top team Germany in the last round, the team will be in the play-off position and will have a chance for promotion by playing a team from the bottom of the A League. This is likely to be Serbia and the team would have good chances in a best-of-five match against them. Well done to the team for playing so well.

Andrew Simons wrote: I lost against Gilles van Eeden 6d by resignation.

In the seventh round of the European B-League, UK were matched against Norway placed fourth. With a staggered start time the match lasted from 19:00 to nearly 23:00 UK time. The match ended a draw with Andrew and Chris winning on the top boards, but Des and Jon losing on the other two. This left the UK in second place with 12 points, as Germany beat Denmark to go clear top with 13 points. Netherlands drew with Austria to stay third on 11 points. With just Netherlands and Sweden to go the UK team are still hopeful of promotion.

Andrew Simons wrote: I won my game against Jostein Flood.

I was black and started off with the AlphaGo (and 19th century) idea that approaching both his 3-4 points to prevent shimaris and then tenuki-ing was a good idea.

The worst snow in Ireland for 36 years struck during the week leading up to the Irish Open weekend. Helped on by Storm Emma, snow drifts stopped all public transport and flights for about two days and many of the 49 possible entrants were unable to arrive. The Irish Rapidplay, scheduled for the Friday evening, was cancelled and the Confucius Cup (Irish Open) was cut from a five-round European Grand Prix event with 1000 euro prize to a three round rapid play event all on the Saturday afternoon. It was held as in recent years in a top hotel, The Gresham Hotel, on O'Connell Street (shown here after most snow had melted).

The only top player whose flights arrived okay was Lukas Podpera, 7d Czechia. He won the event easily, with America's Yisheng Wang (5d) in second.

The sixth round of the B-League on 20th February saw the UK playing and beating Austria, to stay at the top of the B-League.

Daniel Hu wrote about his game against Viktor Lin: I lost by resignation. I played quite calmly in the opening, aiming for a long game. He had an interesting tesuji to settle the top right, and it worked well with his thickness from attacking my weak group. It was probably proper for me to make two eyes with my weak group earlier on, but he ambitiously fought in my area of influence. I got an extremely good result and he lost most of his territory on the right, while his centre group was still hanging. Probably I played too slowly as usual and soon entered overtime.

He then came to attack my weak group and I got out pretty comfortably. I tried to live actively while capturing a tail of his centre group and succeeded for the most part, until a sudden misread meant my capture turned round to capture me.

The fifth round of the B-League on 23rd January saw the UK playing Finland. Yet again our team did extremely well, winning the match 4-0. As top placed team Netherlands lost to Germany 3-1, the UK team returned to the top spot, on boards-won tie break from Germany (18-16); Netherlands dropped to third.

Bruno Poltronieri wrote about his game against Javier-Aleksi Savolainen: I won by resignation. Not much happened until I decided to start poking at his floating group in the top right which seemed a bit over extended. I started with a peep, which he didn't really answer, so I was able to cut off a chunk of the group and kill it. In exchange he got a ponnuki in the centre, but since I had strong centre stones nearby it wasn't really worth much. After that I had a big lead.

The fourth round of the B-League on 12th December saw the UK playing one of the other teams on three wins, Germany. After some exciting games the match ended a draw. This left UK just above Germany on boards won, but Netherlands were expected to beat Turkey and take the number one spot in the league table.

Daniel Hu wrote: I won against Jonas Welticke 6d by resignation, bring me to an unbelievable 10/10 on pandanet! This was supposed to be my toughest test so far, so while maths has been prioritised this term, I tried to study go for the last 2 weeks, particularly define 3.0 on the computer Go server.

He opened adventurously with four 11-3s. Especially as I wanted to play territorially anyway, this set bells ringing in my head that this should be a territorial game (hard to make frameworks, so I focused on the corners). He invaded 3-3 into my star point and his result was poor when I took the corner (the 10-3 was an inefficient one space extension from a ponnuki).

Congratulations go to Jenny Rofe-Radcliffe and Francis Roads for winning two games at the 28th International Amateur Pair Go Championship in Tokyo. They beat the pairs from Chile and Switzerland, losing to three Japanese pairs, to take 25th place.

For a change, a Japanese pair (Unegawa and Takizawa) were the winners. Korea took second, China third and Chinese Taipei fourth. The European Pair Go Champions, Natalia Kovaleva and Dmitry Surin, took ninth and Klara Zaloudkova and Jan Hora, from Czechia, also won three games.

Full results (off-site)

If the parallel student event, Korean pairs took the top two positions, with a Chinese pair third. UK's Joanne Leung was paired with Russia's Alexander Vashurov and they beat Singapore to score one out of four.

Full results (off-site)

The third round of the B-League on 14th November saw the UK playing Turkey. Unfortunately the captain forget the time difference and so there was a panic to gather the players in time for a 19:00 start. In the end Bruno Poltronieri was not back in time to play, so the team shuffled up and Jon Diamond played board 4.

The match was bagged with wins on all four boards, leaving them with 12 straight board wins for the season so far.

Daniel Hu wrote: I won by 6.5 against Denis Karadaban. I played pretty slow, somewhat tired. I started with an AlphaGo Master opening, influenced by Deepzengo vs Fujisawa Rina, and my result seemed good. The game was pretty much endgame very early, and we probably both made large mistakes simply because there were so many options (at least I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing). I thought for a while to check if his upper right group was killable, but decided it probably wasn’t.

The UK team won again in the European Teams to stay top of the B-League (equal with Germany). They beat Switzerland by four games to nil.

Andrew Simons wrote:

I was playing John Walch 4d again, who always gives me a tough game. As we are both slow players who struggle in overtime, my plan was to play faster than him, but that plan soon evaporated! We did a mini-Chinese plus not-avalanche opening that was popular in pro games a few years ago, but quickly went into uncharted territory and I spent a lot of time and ended up loosely connecting on top and capturing a stone in a ladder whilst he got some big territory with bad aji, seemed so-so.

After his double approach I tried out a 2nd line hanging connection pros like that's supposed to give my group more eyeshape (spoiler alert, it died).