Foreign Tournament Report

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).

The UK team started the new season of the European B League by beating Denmark by four games to nil. This put the team in first place, equal with Germany. Congratulations to them for this result!

Daniel Hu wrote:

I won by 16.5 points in a very intense game of 160 minutes against Jannik Rasmussen (4d). I played pretty well, certainly better than on Saturday, but it took me around 20 minutes to get my reading and shape feeling up to scratch. I think my opening was slightly better, playing an AlphaGo joseki, but it was an unfamiliar fight, and it used up a lot of my time. He was left to cut with an empty triangle, while I got sente.

In the middle game, I played an invasion that got slightly messy, as my top side got reduced, and I spent several moves playing dumb second line kosumis on the right side not worth much territory, but reducing his eye space.

AlphaGo won the third game of the the match bringing its opponent, Ke Jie, to tears and winning the match 3-0.

BBC Radio News reported that it had been announced that AlphaGo would no longer play humans.

On the previous day (Friday 26th) AlphaGo had beaten a team of Chinese pros, who could discuss the game, by resignation. Its only loss of the week was with a Chinese professional partner against itself and another Chinese professional partner in a Pair Go game.

The last man-machine match was held in Wizhen in China, between top Chinese play Ke Jie and Deepmind's AlphaGo. The first game on 23rd was very close with AlphaGo just winning by half a point. The second on 25th was a very complicated fight with AlphaGo winning by resignation to clinch the best-of-three match.

Also this week, Deepmind's founder, Demis Hassabis, was the guest on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs.

For more details of the match read the media reports in the national press or the Deepmind report which has game records at the bottom.

The last round of the B-League on 16th May saw the UK playing Italy. Board one was played a day early. The match was drawn with wins on boards 3 and 4.

Andrew Simons wrote: I'm afraid I lost my game last night against Allesandro Pace. I was happy with how the opening went, and played a shoulder hit I'd seen in a Lee Sedol game to counter his influence strategy. Once I played the last big opening point on the left he played a strange attachment underneath and rather than directly answering I went for a leaning attack. He then played a loose move (f7 rather than f8, afterwards he said it was misclick) which allowed me to clamp to get the side but instead I got carried away and played what was essentially an endgame move at e2 so he fixed the clamp problem in sente. He then played a sharp attachment which I answered submissively and couldn't break into his moyo due to his own clamp tesuji.

The 10th round of the B-League on 25th April saw the UK playing Austria. The match was drawn after some good play on boards 1 and 2.

Des Cann wrote: Very happy. Won by 1/2 pt against Viktor Lin ranked 24th on European rating list. He invaded my right-hand side Chinese twice, which was actually reasonable as I had tenukied. Then he leant on my bottom side and went for a severe attack on my small group in between his two groups. However he overplayed his hand and my group lived, cutting of some stones and connecting to my top right corner making it big. From then on he played hard everywhere testing me. It got quite complicated, but nothing fell off. System said I'd won by 12.5, but komi had defaulted to -5.5, so the corrected score was 0.5

Daniel Hu wrote: I won by resign against Lothar Spiegel. My opponent did something weird in the Chinese that I didn’t know what to do against.

This annual championship for male-female pairs was held on the 1st and 2nd April in Strasbourg in France.

Winners were Natalia Kovaleva and Dmitry Surin from Russia winning all six games. Second were Germany’s Pei Zhou and Lukas Kraemer and third were the Russian professional siblings, Svetlana Shikshina and Ilya Shikshin.

The UK’s Joanne Leung and Bruno Poltronieri were eleventh out of 28. They beat a Slovakian and two French pairs, but lost to the Russian pros, the Romanian Pair and Ngoc-Trang Cao and Antoine Fenech of France.

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