Belgian Go Federation

Up to twenty players took part to the Belgian Championship last week. It's always an interesting tournament, with ghost players emerging from the shadows, and surprises in the results even in games played with a large gap of level.

Results are online, congratulations to all! Finals will take place on 3rd, 4th, 17th and 18th March 2012, and we'll try to find a quiet place to guarantee seriouse games.

Tournament information page

Dear Belgian Go-players,

The 2011 interclub season has come to an end with an exciting final round.
After the first half of the season Leuven had a strong lead, but in the second half Gent gained the lead. In the decisive final round, Gent won against Leuven with 3-0.

Antwerpen picked up the pace in the second half, but could not help getting third place with 4 point. Leuven got 6 points, and Gent has 8, and takes the interclub cup from Leuven.

Congratulations to all three teams !

This was the first time double rounds were played, due to the "record" number of teams participating. As organiser, my impression is that with three or four teams participating, playing double rounds is feasible if the captains are motivated. A little bit of prompting from the organiser seems to be enough to get all rounds to be played within a good time frame.

I would like to thank Philip Vlummens, Kris Boyen and Marcel Van Herck for speedy and correct transmission of results.

I hope to see a lot of teams in the 2012 interclub tournament !

Cheers,
Robby Goetschalckx,
Interclubs Organiser

This round against Finland was a big challenge, since their team had been undefeated till now. However, we managed to achieve an impressive win on board 4, congratulations!
Find the games on the website.

The Belgian Go Federation was present at the Japan Expo Belgium on Nov. 4th-6th. It was great, there were many people eager to learn Go, and we distributed about 400 leaflets with Go clubs addresses; we hope to have as many new players!

The place was very noisy and busy; teaching Go is not easy when the players can't even sit and the teacher can't talk louder than the Japanese drums. We invite all interested players to join the nearest club or try KGS to play online. Note: there is a small mistake in the papers, the club organizing lessons for beginners is located in 1083 Ganshoren (not 1038). More info on the clubs page.

Dear new players, don't try to buy hundreds of books to get started. Don't even watch Hikaru again. Just play, play many many games, and you'll become very strong soon. Good luck!

The 26th Brussels Tournament took place on Oct. 29th and 30th in Palais du Midi, Brussels.

The Belgian Go Federation organized it and 77 participants took part. There were players from all around Europe, and even further: Belgium of course, but also Hungary, Germany, France, Great-Britain, Turkey, Finland, Slovakia, Poland, but also Brazil, China and Korea!

It was an Ecup tournament level 4, in five rounds MacMahon.

The last round was very exciting because six top players (Csaba Mero, Chen Lei, Vincent van Gelderen, François Gonze, Simon Billouet and Kang Kyoungnang) had already three wins and one loss; note the achievement of François, Belgian 4d, who managed to beat two 6d.

Finally, after a very long and breath-taking game between Kang and Csaba, that was observed passionately by dozens of players in live but also about 150 players on KGS, Csaba managed a win by 3,5 and took the first place.

It was a great tournament and we hope to have even more players next year. Congratulations to all!

Links:

Full Results

Lucas Neirynck represented Belgium at the 6th KPMC in Korea. He did a great result: he won against Uffe HOLMSGAARD RASMUSSEN (Denmark), Rory WALES (Ireland) and Ron Lavi (Israel), and lost against Satoshi HIRAOKA (Japan), Gabriel Benmergui (Argentina) and King Yau Anson NG (Hong Kong). He is the 24th player out of 70, which is a nice achievement regarding the rude competition.
Complete results here: http://www.eurogofed.org/results/world/kpmc2011.htm

A workshop will take place on Dec. 10th and 11th (weekend) in Brussels.

Location will be precised soon. We try to find a place quiet enough and easily accessible.

The teacher will be In-Seong Hwang, Korean 7d, and official instructor in Switzerland. He's been much appreciated at the Go camp, so he proposed to innovate with a second teaching experience, in winter.

You can find his teaching program and some sample documents here.

If you want to take part, you have to pay the teaching fees before November 1st!

If we don't have enough players to organize the class, we will have to cancel, that's why we have to know soon enough, thank you for your understanding.

In-Seong Hwang is a very good teacher, and we hope many players will take the time to enjoy his lessons and improve faster thanks to him.

Click here for complete information and preregistration!

26th Brussels Tournament on Oct. 29th and 30th: information (English) and online registration

26e Tournoi de Bruxelles les 29 et 30 octobre: information (français) et inscription en ligne

26str Brussels Go Tornooi 29-30 Oktober, 2011: informatie (Nederlands) en online registratie

Only four participants took part to this year Youth and Student Championship. It was argued that the age limit should have been at 29 instead of 20, because there is a European Student Championship where students can take part until 29. Next year we will take it into account.

Given the small number of participants, we decided to make it a round-robin championship (meaning everyone plays against each other once).

It comes out that Ly Duc Khang is our Student Champion and Adrian Dzienisiuk is our Youth Champion.

It was our first round for this new season, and we fought proudly, though the opponent was much stronger on paper. Congratulation to the team! Find the games on the website.