A few simple rules ... limitless possibilities

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 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).

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 Roumeliotis Odysseas Jones (Cambridge), Abhirami Sankar (Cambridge), Baron Allday (No Club) and Alistair Wall (Wanstead).

Results

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.

It was all fun and games at the Hitachi-Maidenhead Tournament. The selection of games available as prizes is shown left. Also non-playing organiser Alison kept other non-players and early finishers amused with various card and dice games. In the Go 35 players battled over three rounds with London's Peikai Xue (2d) being unbeaten to win the event. Runner up this time was Jon Diamond (2d), third was Jacob Zhang (4d) and fourth Kalle Timperi (1d). All those on two wins got the choice of one of the prize games, wine or cash as a prize, whereas those on three wins got two of the three choices. Those on three were Gokul Ramanan Subramanian (3k Cambridge), Oliver Bustos-Langton (6k Keele) and Oliver Bardsley (17k Sir John Lawes). Best school team, winning some old Go World magazines was Sir John Lawes.

26 players (and a few hangers-on) attended the second Harpenden Go Tournament (previously the Welwyn Garden City Go Tournament) on Sunday 12th January, which had an upped entry level of 1 dan. It was held again in the Harpenden Arms Public House, which still had its Christmas Lights up to honour the tournament, which wouldn't have happened on last year's March date. Afterwards some of the players enjoyed dinner at a local Italian restaurant.

Toby Manning (1d) was the overall winner, just clinching the final game of the final round against Michael Webster (1d), by a small margin, as shown above.

Nineteen participants ranging in age from mid-teens upwards, from eight countries took part in the traditional London Open Rengo tournament on the afternoon of New Year's Eve. We could have had eight teams, reports Jenny Rolf-Radcliffe, but that would have lent itself to a boring number of pairs. Thus we had two fours, three threes and one pair to make the games more interesting - after all, a large part of the fun of Rengo is to have games between teams of different sizes. This year was very balanced; at the end of three rounds there were no teams on zero wins and just one team on three wins. The unanimous decision was made to stop playing while we had a clear winner, and to get on with the eating, drinking and talking phases of the evening.

On the 28th December, dozens of people assembled in the capital for the London Open (the 46th), held this year for only the second time at the current London Go Centre. Despite the fact that more entrants were allowed this year (one hundred), there were a fair number of 'no-shows' which meant just 87 players actually took part. This was disappointing and unfair to the people on the waiting list who couldn't enter because the entry limit had been reached; organiser Gerry Gavigan will make sure that next year only those who have paid the full entry fee on booking will be guaranteed a place.

Sixteen countries fielded players with ages ranging 'from seven to seventy-seven'. The grades ranged from 7d to 16k; both stronger and weaker players were well represented with 28 dan players and 15 Double-digit kyus, six of whom were from Cheadle Hulme School (CHS).

This longstanding event returned with a bang this year. After several years of poor attendances there were 24 entrants, with a good spread of grades and seven players above the bar, set at 2k. The outright winner was Matthew Scott (1d) with 4/4. Prizes were awarded to all six players on 3/4: Joel Barrett (4k Manchester), Josh Gorman (4k Glasgow), Quinlan Morake (5k Glasgow), Yun Lu (8k Edinburgh), Frankie Higgs (11k Lancaster) and a visitor from Belgium, Alexandre Terefenko (6k). Nick Gotts (10k Edinburgh) also won a prize for being the highest DDK.

Results

This year's debutant organiser, Adrian Abrahams reports:

There was very nearly no Three Peaks competition this year, after I failed to confirm the venue's booking at the Wheatsheaf pub in Ingleton. Fortunately, I got an eleventh-hour reprieve, when Ai Guan from my own club Lancaster pointed me in the direction of the Ingleton Boy Scouts hut.

Barring a cataclysmic act of nature, the Three Peaks WILL be back at the Wheatsheaf next year.

This year the Varsity Match between Oxford and Cambridge universities raised its profile, by having the match at the neutral venue of the London Go Centre.

The three-player teams played three rounds, with Cambridge emerging the winners by six boards to three.

The Oxford players were Alexandru-Petre Pitrop, Han Yang and Guodong Cao, and the Cambridge players were Tony Tunyang Xie, Doha Chris Lee and Zherui Xu. They are shown with non-playing John Bamford from Oxford University.

R1: Cao 0:1 Xie; Pitrop 0:1 Xu; Yang 1:0 Lee

R2: Pitrop 0:1 Lee; Yang 0:1 Xie; Cao 0:1 Xu

R3: Yang 1:0 Xu; Cao 1:0 Lee; Pitrop 0:1 Xie