Junior Tournament Report

Alvina Kwok regained the British Youth Go Champion title at the British Youth Go Championship. Despite the previous winner Ryan Zhang being away at the KPMC in Korea, she still had to play well, as Hayes Lee, a player only recently arrived in the country, was playing well to only lose to Alvina and claim an open under-14 title.

We took part in the 3rd Quzhou Lanke Youth International Child Friendly Amateur Weiqi Tournament. This is for teams of 3; we only had 2 players, Ryan Zhang 3d and Lukasz Kudla 5k who were able (and qualified) to play, so we recruited a strong Romanian youth, Dragos Boldeanu to make up the team entitled "UK International".

The 20 teams played a 7-round unseeded Swiss. Consequentially there were many mismatched games.

The UK youth team has won the European Youth Team Competition 2025 having won all four preliminary rounds, their semi-final against Romania and this weekend the final against Germany.

The UK youth Go teams in two different European leagues co-incidentally both played Germany last week.

Congratulations to Ryan Zhang (3d) who was Under-12 champion and became British Youth Go Champion for the first time. However he was not the best of the 37 players as Chenhe Yuan (5d), just arrived in the UK, won all six games to take the Open title.

The UK youth squad won their third round match 3-2 against Romania yesterday in the European Youth Go team Competition. With one round to go this leaves the UK in third place.

The UK youth team narrowly lost to France by two boards to three in the second round of the European Youth Team Competition. Our U12 boards, Ryan Zhang and Yanyi Xiong, both picked up wins. Ryan's game was particularly exciting culminating in a half-point win, with Yanyi again performing strongly against a higher-rated player to gain a 7.5-point win. Our two U16 boards, Alvina Kwok and Daniel Yang, fought hard but were not able to defeat their slightly stronger opponents. On the top board Scott Cobbold had an exciting game against Linh Vu Tu, a 4 dan, but ultimately had to resign.

Congratulations to Alvina Kwok (2d) who is our new Under-16 and British Youth Go Champion. Shown left, she is the first girl to win the event since Maria Tabor in 2008. Alvina, who is originally from Hong Kong, was the best of the 38 players and defeated Scott Cobbold (4d) and Ryan Zhang (2d) on her way to the trophy.