A few simple rules ... limitless possibilities

The 2012 Youth Championships had 13 competitors aged from 6 to 18, with strengths from 2 dan to 30 kyu. The library block at Bloxham School, Oxfordshire, served again as a great venue. Tian-Ren Chen from Loughborough regained the youth title, the previous year's winner not contesting it this year.

The AGM will be considering a proposal from Council on subscriptions. Council is initiating a discussion on some aspects of subscription policy on the bga-policy mailing list with to get some member feedback, preferably before the AGM.

If you want to join the discussion please join this list (you need to be a BGA member) and search the archive for postings made on and after 15th March.

Jenny Radcliffe has announced that she will not be standing again for Council at this year's AGM.

This means that there will definitely be at least one vacancy on Council.

The Trigantius Tournament was won by Andrew Simons (3d Cambridge), beating Alex Rix (3d London) in his last game. Also on 3 out of 3 were Sue Paterson (4k, Brighton), Roger Daniel (5k, CLGC) and Richard Mullens (6k, St Albans).

The family of the late Allan Scarff has generously made publicly available a number of files of Allan's work in the area of Go-playing software and Artificial Intelligence, in the hope that others interested in these fields will find them useful.

Allan was a pioneer of computer Go, writing a number of award-winning programs for BBC Acorn microcomputers in the 1980s

We don't have any offers to host the 2013 British Open currently, so we're inviting people to submit offers to run this annual tournament.

In the last few years we've been to Edinburgh, Malmesbury and this year to Durham, so it would be nice to have a location in the South East for 2013; but we're prepared to consider any offers.

If you're interested please talk to any Council member.

We intend to restart the online leagues at the beginning of April 2012

The Individual League has already made a start and we would encourage it to continue. Remember that it is "self-pairing" you can play anyone in your division as often as you like (although please try to play other people you haven't played recently if you have a choice).

The following clubs have had changes in the last few months:

Accommodation Update

We're planning to block book some bedrooms for players in the British Open in one of the Durham colleges close to the venue.

The rooms will be bed and breakfast for the Friday and Saturday nights, and will cost £55pp (standard) / £70pp (ensuite) for the entire weekend.

Other accommodation will be available, but if you would like to make use of this block

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.