Round 5 results, European Team Championships

So yesterday evening South Africa lost… 1-3 against the UK… I observed all the games, and I was really hopeful for this, but it turned around against South Africa fast. Andrew Davies resigned first, giving SA its first loss; John Leuner scraped a win, which made me hopeful again; then Ben Gale’s resignation made me cry… Victor Guang Chow lost by 0.5, sealing our fate. The sgf files are online here, if you go through them you can see me trying to kibitz a bit, but mostly being lost as to what was happening.

First board – Victor Guang Chow 7d (white) v. Andrew Simons 4d (black)

B+0.5; 6.5. deom [덤; komi]
279 at S7

This game went over my head… at some point (around move 100 or so) someone commented that White was comfortably ahead. But I didn’t see it… Though what was clear to me was that Victor (white) played slow and steady; at some point I thought he fell behind, which most people agreed with. I thought he’d pull of some near pro brilliant move towards the middle of the endgame, but no… He caught up, played a very close endgame but ended up losing by half a point.

Second board – Jon Diamond 3d (white) v. Ben Gale 4d (black)

W+Resign; 6.5 deom [덤; komi]

This game was relatively short in terms of number of moves, but was the second to last to end. Ben (Black) lost due to a simple mistake in byoyomi; he had literally 5 seconds per move at that point, so the pressure must have been immense. If he had played the right place, played 147 at M9 instead of D8, he would have won. Basically, he didn’t have time to count liberties, and didn’t realise he had to connect. So he resigned after he made that mistake, as at that point he would be too far behind.

Third board – Andrew Davies 3d (white) v. Des Cann 3d (black)

B+Resign; 6.5 deom [덤; komi]

This game… well, I was all cheerleadery for the only Capetonian on the team that day… But to no avail… I know Andrew is a very territorial player, but in this game he ended up struggling. Some comments suggested that he played too solidly and too close to his thickness with 30 at B8; instead perhaps a move somewhere else would have been better; I’m not strong enough to assess that, but from then on Black pushed White around the board, Andrew struggled to find life for his group and Black made big territory in that process. Resignation is the result…

Fourth board – Paul Taylor 2d (white) v. John Leuner 3d (black)

B+20.5; 6.5 deom [덤; komi]
189 at R1; 208 at K12; 211 at J12; 214 at K12; 217 at J12; 220 at K12; 223 at J12; 226 at K12; 229 at J12; 232 at K12

This game was the only win for South Africa, though it shouldn’t have been… White was ahead by move 146, as the entire upper left corner had only dead Black stones in it… But the Black’s throw in at R2, robbed White of its only eye at move 187, meaning that suddenly there is a 30+ swing in the game. White kept playing, but ended up losing. In the end they played a ko fight, which I didn’t get… it was beyond insignificant, the game was over… Maybe White just wanted to win at least another battle before losing the war…

European Team Championships 2014/2015 – League C, Round 5

South Africa is playing the United Kingdom today in the European Team Championships; the match will take place at 20:00 CET/CEST on IGS (19.00 WET and 21.00 EET/SAST). Currently United Kingdom is at the top of the League C with 8 points, tied with Bulgaria, and South Africa is third with 7 points; so this will be an interesting match, if South Africa pulls of another win, then we’d be tied with the UK, and Bulgaria will be at the top (unless they lose their match against Spain, but that’s unlikely.) But for this match, South Africa is playing its secret weapon: Victor Guang Chow, the top player in South Africa at 7d; currently the best player on the UK team is ranked at 4d, so this match is far from equal… This is the line up:

• 1st board: Victor Chow 7d
• 2nd board: Ben Gale 4d
• 3rd board: Andrew Davies 3d
• 4th board: John Leuner 3d

A  3d, and bunch of 2d players are in reserve… And thus, maybe the odds be ever in our frakkin’ favour. The lineup for the UK isn’t listed online yet, but the top players in their team are a 4 dan, 2 3 dans, and 3 2 dans. For a bit of background, our 1st board used to be whatever the Chinese equivalent is of a yeonguseng [연구생; insei], and started playing at 6 years old; I heard he almost made pro before he came to South Africa. Of course, anything can happen, but still I’ve got a good feeling about this one.

Reviews of South African games from Round 1

So Victor Chow (7d), the highest ranked player in SAGA, and thus probably in South Africa, has graciously reviewed the recent games of the South African team at the Pandanet European Team Championship 2014/2015. Just to reiterate: South Africa drew 2-2 against Spain; next round we’ll go up against Cyprus. The reviews are posted online at the SAGA website, but I’ve linked them through directly here:

Board 1 – Andrew Davies (adavies) 3 dan

Board 2 – John Leuner (jemna) 3 dan

Board 3 – Andre Connell (iaznab) 2 dan

Board 4 – Chris Welsh (sente) 2 dan

You’ll need a viewer of some sort to view the files and the comments; if you are on any online server through a client, your client probably can open these files as well. If not, here is a list from which to choose an sgf editor/viewer. I haven’t gone through the comments yet, but I’m looking forward to it; while not everything will be comprehensible to me, I always find it useful to see the kibitzing when observing games on KGS; I imagine this is similar, but more static, and less sarcastic humour.

 

 

South Africa at the European Team Championships & and drinking wine while playing

All we needed was a high-level dan or a pro waving a hand-fan to give us live commentary

So SAGA (the future SABA) has gained some sort of observer status with the EGF… Kinda sounds like the start of a a post for my other blog, all about acronym ridden NGO issues, but it isn’t; SAGA, also known as the South African Go Association, became an observer member of the European Go Federation; because South Africa, in defiance of its name, is in fact a country in Northern Europe. Okay, all jokes aside, I do understand the reasoning behind this, as there are no other countries with the amount of active baduk players as South Africa has in the rest of the continent (and I think SAGA has only two digits on its membership list.) I guess if we set up an African Baduk Federation, and create a team championship, I’d have more luck in snatching a title at some point in my amateur career, though that is the only sense that would make. In any case, yesterday at the weekly Cape Town Go Club we ended up spending quite some time watching the South Africans play as it is an online tourney on the IGS server; we’ve got a team of four players ranked around low dan who were taking on Spain in Round 1 in the C League, outcome was a draw 2-2, and they better don’t pull a Bafana Bafana stunt on us after this. I mean I really hate supporting anything rugby related, but that is the safest bet when it comes to South African sports; please let this be my alternative! The official results are online, but I’ll spell the ones relevant to me out here:

Spain vs. South Africa   2 – 2

Tuesday 30 September 2014, 20:00 CET/CEST

Spain	South Africa	Score
Juan Francisco (“Paco”) García de la Banda (palmero) 3 dan	Andrew Davies (adavies) 3 dan	W+3.5
Jesus Roldan (jesusin0) 2 dan	John Leuner (jemna) 3 dan	W+Resign
José-Manuel Vega (spaniard) 1 kyu	Andre Connell (iaznab) 2 dan	W+11.5
Rogelio Gomez (Saurox) 5 kyu	Chris Welsh (sente) 2 dan	W+3.5

The links under the score lead to .sgf files with the actual games, both game played by South Africa that we won (those were the ones I was paying attention to while I should have been paying attention to the game I was playing at that time) were very close throughout the matches. So Tuesday 21 October South Africa will move to play Cyprus at 8pm SAST. Cyprus lost to Portugal 1-2, with the remaining game ending in no result (because they didn’t pay their ADSL bills on time, my theory.)

For some reason this picture is on its side and I can’t change it, which bugs me…

So after looking at the three tablet screens for a while we decided to play an actual game, instead of commenting on the games that our South African compadres were playing. The guy (4k) I played against last time, played simultaneous games against me and a 10k that beat me the week before. Actually let me call the 4k dude “The Corner Killer” because every-time we play, he manages to live in my corner and annihilate my stones there. So my game against the Corner Killer was as usual, I got ripped to pieces… We didn’t even bother counting, see the result for yourself here by way of a picture of my obvious defeat. When I finished, I observed Corner Killer take on… lets call him 10k Master, cause he might be 10k but loves teaching others, to my delight. That game was close, Corner Killer won by 10 points in a 3 stone handicap game, which means that 10k Master might actually be closer to a 7k than a 10k.

Part of my feels that I’m not improving, but I’m rebuked quickly with a lot of baduk theory as to why it feels like that and why I am improving and why they can see that I am improving… Though I have to watch out, Corner Killer and 10k Master might just be toying with me, I mean the latter has a cat… and he has pictures of his cat playing baduk… so you never know.