Strong Players Training

A very successful weekend for some 18 of the strongest British Go players was held at the Village Hall and Kirsty and Matthew Macfadyen's house in Barford.

The Icelandic Volcanic plume that on the Thursday disrupted our travel plans for Guo Juan, who lives in Amsterdam, and created some panic for the organisers.

However, a PC, projector, camera, microphone and other stuff were sorted out, and she did the whole weekend remotely using the Internet with Skype for the voice channel. It actually worked very well and the technology was in some ways better than using a demonstration board face-to-face.

Several lecture sessions were held, many games reviewed and a 9 a side rengo game took place after dinner, with Guo knocking out players who played moves below their playing level. We were down to 3 a side when Guo decided that a large group had just been killed by Matthew to end the game.

Many lessons were learnt and we hope they'll be put into effect shortly.

Thanks to Winton Capital Management for providing funding towards the event.