The Online Study Group (formerly Shodan Challenge) will be starting on 29th November and running for six weeks. Players of any strength who wish to improve their go-playing abilities are very welcome!

You are encouraged to choose a goal to work towards for six weeks, and a study plan to follow during that time. Using the group, you can arrange matches with players of similar strengths, request / offer teaching games, or discuss variations of a game you have played or watched. There will be a league system in place to help you find opponents of around your strength.

(Stronger players are also encouraged to join to help review games and offer advice. Please note that you are only committing to six weeks at a time, and you are not assigned individual students to mentor, so the level of commitment required is low!)

To sign up, please send an email to me with your name and approximate rank (if applicable).

Just to remind you that the second game of the BGA title match takes place on Saturday at about 10:00am. Once again the moves will be relayed live on KGS.

The four qualifiers from the various events played the semi-finals of the Scottish Championship. David Lee (Dundee) beat Piotr Wisthal (Aberdeen) in the first and Matt Crosby beat Martha McGill (both Edinburgh) in the second. In the best of three final, played on KGS, David beat Matt by two games to one to hold on to the title for a fourth year running.

A Go hothouse sprang up in Letchworth Garden City, over the weekend of 8th - 10th November, when 14 of the our strongest and most promising players congregated at the home of Letchworth Go Club organizers Simon and Alison Bexfield for an intensive weekend honing their Go skills under the guidance of Guo Juan 5 dan professional.

Whilst most eyes were on the first game of British Championship match, which saw Andrew Kay beat Andrew Simons, 39 players assembled in Grange-over-Sands for the Three Peaks Tournament. Toby Manning (2d Leicester) won with a perfect score of five, this being the second time he had won the event (the first time being in 1994). Second with four wins was Richard Hunter (3d Bristol). Also winning four games were David Cantrell (5k South London), Eggert Fruchtenicht (11k No Club) and Emma Nicholls (14k Durham).

Results

We've just been informed that the 1st Zhu Gang Cup World Team Go Championship will be held from 19th to 26th December 2013 in Guangzhou City, Guang Dong province in China. The competition is composed of three kinds of teams: Seeded teams (China, Japan, Korea and Chinese Taipe), Wild Card teams (China, Japan and Korea) and Non-seeded teams. European players are invited to take part in this competition as non-seeded teams. The sponsors will pay for all costs in China, with players having to pay for their own travel arrangements.

We're trying to put together a UK team of three players (potentially with a non-playing captain), albeit at short notice and at an inconvenient time of year. If you're interested please get in touch with me and I'll send to the detailed information that we have. The closing date for us to submit our team is 9th December.

You will, of course, need to be a BGA member!

We're up to three wins out of three now in the European Team Championship. This month our match was against Iceland.

All of the matches were comfortable wins this time, giving us a good 4-0 scoreline to put us top of our division once more. On board 1, Andrew Simons made things a little edgy towards the end but was ahead by so much that a win was still assured. Meanwhile on board 4, while the other games still had only around 10-20 moves played, Henry Manners and his opponent went off to the pub having played the entire game (1 hour each + 25 stones in 10 minutes Canadian byo-yomi) each using around 10 minutes! Who needs to think to win by almost 100 anyway...

The UK's pair of Natasha Regan and Matthew Cocke had a tough draw which caused them to struggle at the International Amateur Pair Go Championship in Tokyo. In the first round they lost to a strong Canadian pair, and were rewarded with a game against China. This they lost as expected and then played and lost to Poland. Bravely they battled on and beat France in round 4 and Denmark in round 5, to end on 2 wins and 26th place.

Report/Results

The latest version of Apple's OS X, 10.9 aka Mavericks, has removed the RSS feed options from Mail and Safari.

They haven't announced a fix to this 'feature', but for those of you who have this technology please go to the App Store and search for RSS. At least one person is using RSS notifier successfully.

Of course, if you haven't noticed that the RSS feed is missing then you won't see this message either...

Les Bock has finally retired as our Archivist after many years in the position.

The Archive is in the process of being transferred to our new Archivist, Barry Chandler, and we'd like to thank Les for his untold years of service.