A few simple rules ... limitless possibilities

Part 2 of 2, of a report on the 25th European Youth Go Championship.

Full names of the people above may be found in a section below. Also, for any photo, you can both hover your mouse over it to see more details, and click on it to see an enlarged version of the photo. You will find all the photos here - and more - on the BGA's photo page for the event.

What are EYGCs?

The EYGC (European Youth Go Championship) is a youth competition, played face-to-face, in a different country each year.

A decade since the first, the 6th Skye Go Tournament was again in the Tongadale Hotel, Portree, reports organiser Carel Goodheir. Their generosity is what has made the tournament possible, but they now make more use of the dining room and unexpectedly we were told we had to vacate it 1.5 hours earlier than previously. This resulted in the third round on Saturday being cancelled. By starting earlier we managed all three on Sunday - thus it was a five round tournament not six as planned.

Matthew Reid (2k Cambridge) won all five to take first place and is shown left with the "Isle of Skye" whisky (not Talisker as Diageo generously donated that five times, but decided a sixth was overdoing it).

Report up to end of Friday 13th March from team captains Martin and Helen:

The European Youth has finished day two, so they have completed four rounds, and tomorrow will be the final day, when they wiĺl play rounds five and six. Out of the 48 games the twelve UK children have played, we had 27 wins, 2 byes, 19 losses.

We have three unbeaten players! The two players on four wins are Lawrence Baker (19k, U12), and Julia Volovich (18k, U16). Lizzy Pollitt (15k, U16) is on three wins and a bye. Also, all the UK players have won at least one game.

Everyone is enjoying themselves, and team spirits are high. As well as us, there are 11 parents with us, so we have been able to review most games.

A fuller report, with photos, will follow after the tournament. We are scheduled to fly home on Sunday 15th March.

The results can be seen on the EYGC website.

Cambridge's Tunyang Xie (5d) was the winner of the Trigantius Tournament, held at the Cambridge University Social Club, for the second year in a row. The event attracted 47 players despite fears over corona virus, though ten pre-registered players did not show. Recommended prevention advice was followed and not many players were wearing masks and there was no noticeable incidence of coughing or sneezing.

The runner-up and third this year were also from Cambridge: Jun Su (4d) and Jamie Taylor (2d). Players winning all three were Gokul Ramanan Subramanian (2k Cambridge), Roger Daniel (8k Central London), Richard Scholefield (10k Milton Keynes) and Andrew Volovich (25k Cambridge Juniors). In addition there were prizes for highest placed player at 20k, 10k, 3k and 1d, namely Odysseas Jones-Roumeliotis (Cambridge), Abhirami Sankar (Cambridge), Baron Allday (No Club) and Alistair Wall (Wanstead).

Results

A player currently living in Ireland, Lucas Zhirui Ye (2d), dominated the Irish Go Congress held in Dublin at the Teachers' Club. He won both the Irish Rapid Play on the Friday evening and the Irish Open. In both he was unbeaten, adding the the five games he won to win the Cork Tournament in November, taking his run to 15 wins. The were 25 players in this year's Open. Results

A longer story with pictures is on the Irish Go website.

In round 7 of the League, our team came up against the top placed team Serbia. Jon Diamond played a day early and lost, and despite playing well the other three lost too, losing the match four-zero. This result saw the team drop one place to fifth.

Bruno Poltronieri wrote: I lost to Dusan Mitic after a pretty bad misread. Overall I’m actually fairly happy with the game. I started a running fight quite early on the right side. At some point my opponent gave me a chance to trade territory at the bottom for a wall facing the top side, which I took. I think that was the wrong choice and I’m probably a bit behind here, but at least it simplified the game. I managed to cut off part of his group in the top left, but that allowed him to try something in my territory. That’s where I misread and lost big. According to Leela his attempt actually shouldn’t work, and I’d be ahead if I countered it correctly! Oh well.

Alex Kent wrote: I lost by 4.5 points to Nikola Mitic.

The UK youth team played Czechia in their fourth and final match of the 2019/20 European Youth Go Team Championship (EYGTC) over the week up to 15th February.

Alison Bexfield, team captain, writes:

On paper we were fielding a team close in strength to those of our opponents, Czechia, with the grades slightly in our favour.

Board 2 was played earlier in the week and Scott Cobbold played well to win by 7.5 points in an evenly matched game. Board 3 played on the Friday and Alexander Hsieh had another closely fought game to lose by 7.5. Since this was a game we had expected to win, this raised the tension for the final three boards. So we went into today 1-1 needing to win two games to win the match.

Alexander Timperi was the first to finish on board 4.

There was a strong entry at the Oxford Tournament. There were five players at 4d and above, and a further five at 3d; all bar one from Romania were of oriental origin. The event had changed back from May to its traditional February date, not far from Valentine's Day, with no clash as Cheshire is in March in 2020 and not February.

The venue was the same though, the former meeting house that is now Oxford Deaf & Hard of Hearing Centre, shown left, tucked behind the new Westgate Shopping Centre. This time 62 players took part, up from 57 last, but a further 14 novices played their own event in the back room during the afternoon.

For the February match, the BGA team was up against a struggling Lithuania. Promoted from the C-League for this season, their team has been struggling and, with only one draw and no wins, they are sitting bottom of the B-League. As a consequence they were reluctant to turn out to play and only one board was contested in our match, with Sandy Taylor, Des Cann and Jamie Taylor having no opponents. This win moved our team up to fourth place.

Alex Kent wrote about his game against Vladas Zaleskas: I won the sole game that was played this evening. I played a more solid opening this time and got a good position where I didn't have too much to worry about. I made some slack moves on the left side and allowed my opponent's nominally weak group some breathing room (it had a potential connection to the upper-left corner), but I still got to use it as a springboard into the centre.

Sixteen top European players qualified to the 3rd European Grand Prix Finale by earning qualifying points from the top European tournaments of 2019. They met up at Leksand in Sweden in January to battle over six rounds, starting with four-player groups, followed by a knock-out stage.

Daniel Hu's great result at the London Open meant he could take part and he had an excellent tournament. He topped Group D, beating two pros, Pavol Lisy and Tanguy Le Calvé, but losing to Stanislaw Frejlak of Poland. He then beat France's Benjamin Dréan-Guénaïzia to reach the semi-finals. This he lost to the Ukrainian pro Artem Kachanovskyi, then he lost again to Stanislaw Frejlak in the play-off to end fourth.