On Sunday 5 July, 30 young Go players gathered online for our first online training tournament for the UK Youth Go Squad, reports Alison Bexfield. Any player who had reached 20k or better was invited (that we were aware of) and it was pleasing to see how many of the players had improved over recent months since we last saw them play.

The tournament was played over three rounds during the afternoon on OGS, where we were able to have a private invitation-only group.

The fact that the strength of our youth players has increased over recent years was evidenced by the fact that 8 of our 30 players were graded 3kyu or stronger (with three of this group in the U12 age group) .

Jacob Zhang is our strongest player and won all three games to lead the top group, although a very rapidly improved Ryan Zhang, now playing at 2k, gave him a good game.

As they finished second in the Pandanet Go European Team Championship C-League, to get promotion Ireland had to beat the B-League's ninth placed team, Sweden.

Board one was played early on Sunday 14th May and Karl Irwin lost to Sweden's Charlie Åkerblom by resignation. The other four boards played on the Tuesday, 16th May, and Philippe Renaut beat Martin Li, also by resignation, to make the match one all. Matei Garcia's game ended when Tiger Hillarp lost on time in a complicated game with huge territories and dead groups, but James Hutchison struggled against Robin Nilsson, eventually resigning. This meant it was all down to the last game between Ian Davis and Anton Silfver. This was a very close and long game, but unfortunately an error in the small yose saw Ian lose a point and the game by half a point.

The meetings on OGS for youth players and parents are continuing every Sunday from 4pm to 6pm. There are junior players from 25-kyu up to 2-kyu and about half a dozen parents joining in as well. New members are very welcome, please contact Paul Smith (paul361smith at gmail.com) for details of how to join.

On 1 June some of our youth players from this group joined in the Dutch youth group on OGS organised by Dave de Vos. We won 6 out of 8 games played against the Dutch junior players (and Alexander Hsieh won a handicap game against Dave), but this wasn't a competition. The point was just mostly to play with some different players and have fun. If there are any other groups on OGS (for example any UK club groups) who we could have a joint meeting with please let Paul know.

On 7 June we started a "Supergo" match on KGS between twelve British youth players and a team of twelve youth players organised by Go teacher Li Ang in China.

Our team’s last match of the season was against Belgium. If we won then we would jump above them into fifth. A loss would move us down near, but just above, the relegation zone. Jon Diamond finished quickly and Des Cann finished slowly, being the last game of the B-League season to end. His game was a win which went with Jamie Taylor’s to make the match a draw. The team stayed to sixth (on tie-break from Switzerland) to end the league comfortably in the middle. Serbia saw off demoted Lithuania to take the top place, and Italy drew with Switzerland to get the promotion play-off place. The most important game of the evening saw the Netherlands beat Sweden, allowing the former to escape the relegation game in favour of the latter.

Andrew Simons wrote: I lost to Lucas Neirynck, returning to my bad old habit of losing on time after unnecessary complications during overtime in a game that I was leading.

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).