The BGA held its first real time online tournament on the 2020 VE Day Bank Holiday weekend. 42 players took part in a three-round Mcmahon tournament on OGS, with one game per day. Zherui Xu (4d Cambridge) came out the eventual winner with three wins. Sandy Taylor (2d Cambridge) took second place and Mark Baoliang Zhang (1k Manchester) was third. All three received Amazon vouchers as prizes. Also picking up vouchers for three wins were Dan Whiteley (11k Birmingham) and Callum Urwin (10k No Club); Callum also took the Highest Placed Double Digit Kyu prize. Gokul Ramanan Subramanian (2k Cambridge) took the highest placed below-the-bar prize.

The intention was to run these tournaments each month whilst unable to run face-to-face tournaments.

Results

The Spring 2020 edition of the BGJ is now available for members to read.

Since face-to-face Go tournaments are currently on hold due to the global Coronavirus pandemic, we have decided to run an online tournament for BGA members. Hopefully this will give people another way to keep in touch and have some fun in these unusual times!

The tournament will be a 3 round Mcmahon tournament run on the Bank Holiday weekend of 8th/9th/10th May and will be EGF rated. The tournament is open to BGA members only - but there is still plenty of time to join the BGA and be eligible to play!

More details of the tournament, and how to enter, here: http://britgo.org/may2020online

In their eighth match of the season the UK played against Italy. The first three games to finish went Italy's way, but the last game ended with a win for Andrew Simons after nearly three hours of play. This loss moved the team down to sixth out of ten, with just the final mach against Belgium on 19th May to go.

Andrew Simons wrote: My game against Matias Pankoke was the opposite of Jon's and Alex's: we had a modern AI joseki, following my attachment against his big low shimari and he made a slight overplay, with the L14 hane instead of extend, and then a big one with the atari which meant his corner turned into mine. As I had a sizeable lead I tried to simplify the game with early settling of my groups (kick and kosumi bunker style) and thick play to avoid any fights (I lost against Matias in the play-offs last year when he out-fought me).

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.