As the Candidates event for this year will take place in early June the Council have decided to extend the period during which a player can achieve a qualifying grade. For this year only players are considered to have qualified if they have finished an EGF rated tournament with a GoR of 1900 or more in the period April 1st 2019 to 9th May 2022.

This means that both the British Open in Lancaster, and the Not the London Open will count as qualifying tournaments for the 2022 championship.

Cambridge’s Trigantius Tournament returned after a year’s Covid break to the excellent new venue of St Philip's Church in Mill Road; this was appreciated for closeness to local shops, cafés and station. Bristol’s Yaoling Yang took top spot from Cambridge University’s Zherui Xu, both on 3 wins out of 3, on SOS tie-break. Other Chinese players took the next five places. The bar was set at an unprecedented 5 dan and higher rated 4 dans were promoted to get eight players above the bar, but then unfortunately two were then drawn down in round one leading to the split tie.

The BGA AGM will be held online by ZOOM at 19:30 on Thursday 26th May 2022. An invite will be created and published a week or so before the meeting.

Any member’s resolutions are to be submitted to the BGA Secretary (secretary @ britgo.org) not later than Thursday 14th April 2022. Each such item will require the support of two BGA members.

The agenda will be published to members via the website no later than Thursday 28th April 2022.

The UK team lost to Austria 3-1 in the Pandanet Go European Team Championship on 8th March; congratulations to Jamie Taylor who provided our win. We are now 9th (out of 10) in league B and in the potential relegation zone: everything now probably depends on our last match against Croatia who are just above us in the Table unless we can beat one of the higher teams.

League Page with game records

There was an emergency online meeting of EGF members on Thursday 3 March. Most European Countries were present.

The meeting agreed to suspend Russia and Belarus from the EGF, but not to expel them.

All EGF events currently scheduled for Russia and Belarus were to be re-allocated.

Russian and Belarusian players will be allowed to participate in EGF events under a neutral banner.

The UK Youth Go Team won against Russia B team to finish third overall in the European Youth Go Team Championship. This is an excellent result especially since our team this year had so many new faces. Russia was again champion, with France (who had beaten UK in round one) in second.

Details of the 2022 British Congress are now available on its web page Congress Info.

Entries are open.

For the February match the UK was against Italy who are in the top half of the league table. All our team lost to give Italy a win. The teams below (Croatia and South Africa) both lost, so the team stayed eighth.

League Page with game records

The Winter 2021-2022 edition of the BGJ is now available for members to read in the Members' Area, with printed copies being sent out around the middle of February.

Some time ago the traditional Candidates / Challengers structure of the British Championship was changed to reduce it to just one qualifying tournament, the 'Candidates'. Sadly Covid and lockdown has meant we have not managed to use this new approach until this year. In 2021 the qualifying event was the hastily arranged British Congress at Leicester.