A few simple rules ... limitless possibilities

The Czech Republic won the finals of the Pandanet Go European Team Championship, held at the European Go Congress in Olsztyn, Poland. The top four teams from the A-League played each other over three rounds to determine the winner. Unfortunately a clock problem on board two of Czechia v Ukraine in round one meant that game having to be replayed. As Russia beat Hungary but drew with the Czechs and the Ukrainians, the Czech Republic could win if they won this last game (having also beaten Hungary). If the game went Ukraine's way they would be second to Russia on tie-break. So Jan Hora and Bohdan Zhurakovskyj were the focus of everyone's attention, in Poland and on Pandanet, with Hora winning the game by resignation and hence the Championship for his team.

Results

The two Russia women dominated the eight player all-play-all European Women's Go Championship. Natalia Kovaleva was the unbeaten winner, Dina Burdakova second. The UK's Alison Bexfield won one game to come 7th. Results

Natalia and Dina also qualified for the European team to the SportAccord World Mind Games. They will join the winners of the SportAccord Mind Games European Qualifier, Fan Hui and Pavol Lisy. This event was also part of the Leksand Summer Go Camp and was held from 20th to 22nd July with 12 invited men players.

The other two members of the European team are Svetlana Shikshina and Ilya Shikshin who previously qualified by winning the 2013 European Pair Go Championship.

We drew our final match against Italy, which we needed to win to avoid relegation. Both Bei Ge and Jon Diamond lost this time. A poor performance all round!

So we ended up with a really consistent record this season, no wins and 4 draws from the 9 matches. Jon Diamond must be tagged as the main culprit - no wins from 6 games.

Must try harder next year...

Another poor result leaves us still in last place in the second division. This time we didn't lose, but only drew against Belgium - our third draw this season and still no win.

Andrew Simons played on Monday, but as he said "Forgot to eat beforehand, didn't concentrate, didn't read, didn't win." Really careless...

Bei Ge's opponent didn't turn up or something, so he won by default.

Jon Diamond got into a poor position early in the middle game, creating some outside thickness for his opponent. Struggling to compete he made a reasonable fist of it, then having cut some stones off just failed to kill them (could he have done so?), ending up with a ko for seki and a significant loss. When his opponent cut a few more stones off as compensation the margin was just too much.

Des Cann retrieved some of our pride, capturing many stones (it felt quite easily).

Our poor run of form continues, but this time we have a really tough match against the table-topping Finns.

Vanessa again had problems with connecting to Pandanet-IGS and dropped out at the last minute, leaving Jon Diamond on top board to face Antti Törmänen (7 dan on Pandanet), who's just had a fantastic result in the World Students Oza, coming third.

38 players attended the 2013 Irish Go Congress, held in Dublin. Csaba Mero, 6d Hungary, won the main tournament, The Confucius Cup, for the second time with a perfect 5/5 score. In second place was Zebin Du, 4d China, and third was Antoine Fenech, 5d France.

Roger Daniel, 6k UK, and Mikulas Kubita, 15k Czech Republic, won all five of their games, while Thomas Shanahan won four. Results

The Friday evening Rapid tournament was won by Yuanbo Zhang, 4d China, with five straight wins, while Roman Pszonka, 3d Poland, came second and Thomas Shanahan, 7k Cork, came third, both with four. Results

After our unfortunate forfeit against the Netherlands last month (we forgot to turn up), we were up against Poland this month.

On board 1 Andrew Simons was looking forward to getting his revenge against Marek Kamiński whom he had narrowly lost to at the Polish Go Summer Camp last year (http://lsg.go.art.pl), but Marek didn't show up so he won by forfeit.

Played the night before, Des Cann was in for a tough match against young talent Stanisław Frejlak who won the Polish Championship last year. Fighting soon broke out in the opening, with his groups getting cut in bad shape and some sharp moves from Stanisław brought down too many groups so Des resigned.

Martha McGill's game against Roman Pszonka also had a lot of running fights with weak groups, but unfortunately the dead groups were once again British so she resigned.

Henry Clay scored a good win against Sebastian Pawlaczyk in his debut for the team.

UK's Vanessa Wong was part of the European team at the 2nd SportAccord World Mind Games in Beijing. In the Women's event she lost to Choi Jeong 2p of Korea, beat Rita Pocsai 5d from Hungary and lost to Natalia Kovaleva 5d from Russia. She also played Pair Go with Jan Hora of Czechia. They lost to Joanne Missingham and Lin Chih-han of Chinese Taipei and then to Irene Sha and Bill Lin of Canada.

The Women's was won by Li He of China and the Men's by Choi Chulhan of Korea. Choi also won the Pair Go playing with Choi Jeong.

Full results (off-site)

Read an interview with her

Our disappointing start this season continues... so badly that we are now bottom of the League with only one draw from four matches!

We are still seeking our first win of the season after a disappointing 1-3 loss to Norway. However, the match was much closer than the result shows.

This was the first game this season that Jon Diamond took the top board and he was facing a tough opponent in Jie Lin Xia 5d. Despite managing to save his weak group after playing tenuki several times, he didn't have enough points and had to resign after some stones got cut off in the yose.

Andrew Simons had a comfortable lead against Øystein Vestgården after making a decisive cut to capture some stones and was playing to simply seal the win, but then embarked on a crazy adventure which resulted in a bad trade which made the game close again.

Despite the first appearance by Vanessa Wong on top board for our team our poor start to the season continues and we're now in the Relegation Zone for the first time.

We had another loss to the Swiss, with Bei Ge managing our solitary win by a substantial margin. Vanessa had much technical trouble starting her game (getting to grips with Pandanet for the first time can be tricky), with her playing White when it should have been Black, and lost by resignation.

A veil should be drawn over the other two games...

Full season results