UK Lose to Italy

For the February match the UK was against Italy who are in the top half of the league table. All our team lost to give Italy a win. The teams below (Croatia and South Africa) both lost, so the team stayed eighth.

League Page with game records

Alex Kent wrote: Alas, I lost my game against Matias Pankoke.The opening was pretty balanced, but I started slipping a bit after defending on the wrong side in the first chase. KataGo's analysis suggests that I should aim for a thick position in the centre and be willing to sacrifice on the side, but I overloaded myself trying to keep everything strong.I was then hanging in there for a while, and I think I did a reasonable job of handling my central group, including a stylish tengen attachment on move 54. I first got into serious trouble when Matias attacked my group on the left. I was etermined to keep all of these stones alive (else I was just behind on territory), so played a bit unreasonably. This actually paid off though as my opponent missed a tesuji, and on move 100 I was back in the game! Fresh from this success, I played a bit belligerently on the right side and ended up coming unstuck as I misread sequence which meant my group got cut off (and died).

Jon Diamond wrote of his game played against Alessandro Pace: I arrived late for the game and then, with pretty poor misreading again after about twenty moves, bang there goes the game with a big group…

Des Cann wrote of his game against Carlo Metta: Disappointing game. I allowed my opponent to have territory and a strong position on the left top in exchange for what I felt was a substantial territory on the top right. But Leela on zbaduk reckons I was well behind and apparently it just went steadily down hill from there. Not a lot happened in the rest of the game primarily because I thought I was doing okay. But eventually he successfully invaded my one big “territory” and, although I played on, there was no real chance to recover, ending 16.5 behind.

Jamie Taylor played Davide Minieri and, after a long game, fell behind before a large edge group died to seal his fate.