A few simple rules ... limitless possibilities

The Spring 2019 edition of the BGJ is now available for members to read.

Our team played was outplayed by a strong team from Sweden, losing all four games. This leaves the team still in seventh place in the B-League, but only on tie-break. The final match of the season will be on Tuesday 5th May, against Turkey.

Alex Kent wrote: I lost by resignation against Fredrik Blomback. The opening did not go well: I went wrong in a "windmill" joseki in the upper-left. I ended up needing to live small while my opponent got a wall. Definitely one I need to investigate! Early in the middle game I started playing more aggressively to try and catch up, but this backfired dramatically and I barely survived. Later on things got a little exciting and I tried a few tricks but to no avail.

Jon Diamond wrote: Against Charlie Akerblom, for a change I didn’t screw things up in the early middle game, but I nearly did so! Decent exchanges in the fuseki and I created a running weak group...

Each year the British Go Congress is held in a different place, with the BGA's Annual General Meeting on the Saturday evening. The 2019 edition was held in the MacDonald Hotel on Manchester's London Road, not far from Piccadilly Station. The weekend started with a teaching session on Friday afternoon with Toby Manning. That evening the British Open Lightning was held; it was won by London's Peikai Xue (2d), shown below left with the trophy.

On the Saturday and Sunday 80 players, many of whom were below 10k, enjoyed the usual six round British Open tournament. It was for the first time won by Chao Zhang (6d) from London, with six wins. Zherui Xu (4d) from Cambridge was placed second with five wins, ahead of Zihe Zhao (4d Oxford) and Nagisa Matsuura (1d Leeds).

After the troubles caused by the snow at last year’s Irish Go Congress, this year it was played under clear skies and ran extremely well. The Confucius Institute was not supporting the event and so the venue reverted to the tradition one, The Teachers’ Club on Parnell Square. Over the weekend 42 players, including visitors from seven countries, took part in the Go.

This started with the 18-player Irish Rapid on the evening of Friday 22nd March. As usual the rounds speeded up from twenty to twelve minutes and the number and size of handicap gaps reduced as the strong players started to dominate. Tunyang Xie (4d) from Cambridge won all five games to take the title. London’s Xunrui Zhao (3d) and Trondheim’s Juan-Manuel Losada (1d) took the next two places.

The Irish Open got underway two minutes early on the Saturday morning (a record) and ran extremely well for the next two days, if you did not mind the noise of a church service coming from next door on the Sunday.

When the Welwyn Garden City Tournament found that the sports centre housing their Bridge Club venue was closing, the organiser, John Collins, had to move the event to the Sunday and to the new venue of the Harpenden Arms, in the High Street of the nearby town. This is also the venue of the new Harpenden Go Club, so it was in fact a good way to promote that too.

It was a bright sunny spring morning, good for travelling by road, but unfortunately a power failure on the railway meant no Thameslink trains at all from London that morning.

Our team played very well and got their first win of the season, against Norway. This moved the team up to seventh place and out of the relegation zone. The next match will be on Tuesday 16th April, against Sweden.

Andrew Simons wrote: I won my game against Severin Hanevik after more than three hours of play and 331 moves including passes. I played an AI-style early 3-3 and then was happy he gave me the thick old joseki in bottom left even though he got sente. He surprised me when he resisted my attachment and took the outside ponnuki, and again when he didn't connect up to the corner; LeelaZero says he should have done so immediately and I should have prevented that instead of my solid tiger mouth. Nevertheless I had a ko for later. I then peeped his wall, as is the rage these days and built a reduction group. I used that to start the ko, but did so too early as he correctly ignored my threat.

This year's Trigantius saw a much improved entry of 69 including seven new players. The venue was again the University Social Club in Mill Lane and the bright spring weather helped attract the large attendance. Play took place in the main bar area (as seen in the picture) and overflowed into a back room for the bottom six boards. Unfortunately this large number made it take longer for Geoff Kaniuk and his team to set the rooms up and to register the players, so the event was half an hour late starting.

Games were successfully played using Fischer timing of 45 minutes, plus 15 seconds per move, which meant the event was still an A-Class for ratings, but this allowed play to continue a bit longer than anticipated.

Our team fought hard and managed a draw against Switzerland. The next match will be on Tuesday 19th March, against Norway.

Andrew Simons wrote: I played my game against John Walch on the evening of Saturday 16th. I won on time, but was fairly confident of winning anyway. The game started with a diagonal opening and me 3-3 invading (as I did against Sam in the second championship game); he took the gote wall so I took its extension and then peeped at it. He resisted, connecting on dame, so we had a fight and I was happy to build centre strength, and then, as he haned at q11, I got to make the dame cut in sente. His group was hard to attack directly though, so we played some more opening stuff. I made a makeshift defence against h17 invasion with l18 hane and got to cap his c9 stone (if he runs it out then I get a splitting attack on lower group) and he made a fun second line invasion on top.

Team Captain Alison Bexfield, and all her squad of 12 players in the UK Youth Go team, can look back on this 2018/19 season with satisfaction, as we finished comfortably mid table, out of the 12 teams. Whilst we lost narrowly (2-3) to Czechia, in the final fixture last weekend, it was an exciting match, and each margin was between one and a dozen points.

If one is superstitious, one might argue that we were "off colour" in the final match - playing 3 boards with the "wrong colour". That's because the match saw White winning on all 5 boards! It was always destined to be a fine margin either way with players, on paper, exactly evenly matched on 4 boards. But we congratulate Czechia on their win, and well done esp. to Edmund and Yanyi. We hope all our players still can gain from the good experience, esp.

Alison Bexfield, Team Captain, has selected players for the UK Youth Go team playing - mostly on Saturday - versus Czechia.
This is our 4th and final match in the 2018/19 European Youth Go Team Championship (EYGTC) and, against the 3 countries we've played so far, we are 2-1 up.

The two teams' captains have done really well, and managed to line up players with exactly the same paper grade as each opponent, save for a 2-grade advantage to the UK on board 1.

The board line-ups for the match are: