Belgian Go Federation

This weekend the preliminaries for the championship were held. There were 11 participants. After the planned location was unexpectedly closed the preliminaries were held at Thomas Connor's place. Thanks Thomas!

These five people qualified for the finals of the championship next year

Missiaen Kwinten (6pts)
Connor Thomas (5pts)
Vannieuwenhuyse Joost (4pts)
Mercier Gabriel (3pts)
Stojanovic Voja (3pts)

Detailed results

On 12th of November, Belgium lost against Norway 1-3.

Belgium team was composed by Jan Ramon (4-d); Kwinten Messiaen(3-d); Thomas Connor (3-d) and Nelis Vets (2-d).

Complete results of the 3rd round here:
http://pandanet-igs.com/communities/euroteamchamps/rounds/236

After 3 (of the 11) rounds, Belgium occupies 9th place out of 12 teams.

Standings after 3 rounds:
http://pandanet-igs.com/communities/euroteamchamps

On 14th of October, Belgium won against Slovenia 3-1.

Belgian team was composed by Jan Ramon (4-d), Thomas Connor (3-d), Nelis Vets (2-d) and Gabriel Mercier (3-k).

Complete results of the 2nd round here:
http://pandanet-igs.com/communities/euroteamchamps/rounds/235

Read report of the 1st Qinling Mountain Cup about "our" 2 new pro Pavol Lisy (1-p) and Ali Jabarin (1-p) on http://eurogotv.com/

(a funny story: in the 1st round, a local Chinese 6-d amateur played Pavol Lisy. He thought Pavol was 1-d...amateur; so, he was quite surprised to be so dramaticaly destroyed :-).

They have also been impressive in Japan: see report "Pavol and Ali at the 11th Sankei tournament in Japan", also on http://eurogotv.com/
They played good games against top pro: the ones they lost were only decided in endgame and Ali won a game against a 8-p !

(it is then amazing to notice that nor Pavol neither Ali are good enough for the top divisions of the Chinese Weichi Academy: they play now only in the 7th out of the 13 divisions (each division counts with 6 players).
http://senseis.xmp.net/?CEGOAcademicSystem%2FEdition20142015
We can thus probably conclude that there are dozens of top Chinese amateurs who are as strong as top (Japanese) professionals !

Vladimir Danek has won the 2014 Brussels tournament ahead of Kim Ouweleen and Olivier Drouot. See full results

A jubango is a 10 game match between two players. The first player to win six games wins the match.

Two of the world's top Go players, Lee Sedol and Gu Li, played a jubango to decide which of them was the stronger player (and probably thus the present world best player - NDLR).

The most anticipated Go event for decades concluded on September 28, 2014, when Lee Sedol defeated Gu Li in their 8th game of the historic 10 game match.
Game 8 took place in Gu Li’s hometown and finished after 350 thrilling moves, with Lee Sedol winning by 2.5 points…

More info: https://gogameguru.com/tag/mlily-gu-vs-lee-jubango/

Belgium lost the 1st round of the European Team Championship 1-3 against Denmark.

Complete results of the round:
http://pandanet-igs.com/communities/euroteamchamps/rounds/234

Standing after the 1st round:
http://pandanet-igs.com/communities/euroteamchamps

WEI Taewoong (Korea) won the 9th edition of the Prime Minister Cup. Second was HU Yuqing (China). Surprinsingly enough, the podium was not completed by the Japanese representative (who ended 4th), but by the competitor from Thailand !
Best European was Dmitry SURIN (Russia) who ended 8th.

"Our guy" was this year Bram Vandenbon (2-d) who scored 3 out of 6. He won against Australia, Peru and Norwegen and lost against Japan, Finland and Netherlands.

Here are the complete results:
http://www.wbaduk.com/event/premier/index.asp?tab_div=3

Here are the results for the 2014 Gent Tournament that took place in July.

The tournament was won by Bram Vandebon(1D), with runner up Dave De Vos(3D) en third place for Kenny Debacq(5k).

The tournament had a total of 15 worthy participants.

Full Results

Open Championship:

Tong Yulin, a professional player from Shangai won the open competition of the 2014 European Championship with a perfect score.

2nd is Wang Chen (9/10), also from Shangai (Wang Chen is the reigning World Student champion), with 8/10.

3rd is another Chinese: Sui Zexiang, 8/10 (one of the very top amateur players).

4rd (and 2014 European Champion; see hereunder) is the French professional (from Chinese origin) Fan Hui.

The fact that Kim Young-Sam, one of these terrible 7-d Korean amateurs who dominated the previous editions of the European Championship (f.i. Kim was open champion in 2011) landed only as 5th is a good indication the strengh of these players !

(Tong Yulin remained also undefeated in the WE tournament.)

European Championship

The final part of European Championship, which is reserved to the European players, starts after the 6th round of the main (open) tournament. The 8 best European players are then selected to play a knout-out tournament.

Here are the results of the final part
(name of the winner first):

Quarter Finals
Fan Hui - Csaba Mero
Ilja Shikshin - Lukas Podpera
Ali Jabarin - Artem Kachanovskyi
Alexandr Dinerchtein - Pavol Lisy

Semi-Finals
Alexandr Dinerchtein - Ilja Shikshin
Fan Hui - Ali Jabarin

Final: Fan Hui - Alexandr Dinerchtein

So, Fan Hui defended his European champion title !

PS: they were only 2 Belgian participants this year: Kris Boyen (4-k) scored 4/10 and Sander Theetaert (17-k) 5/10.

Complete results here:
http://www.eurogofed.org/results/congress/egc2014.htm