Fotografija: Y. Kayama / WAGC
28th World Amateur Go Championship, which was held from May 28th to May 31st in Tokyo, Japan, was won by the Chinese reprezentative, 13-year old Ziteng Shan 8d, who swept the opposition with straight wins in eight rounds of the tournament. Following him were Dong-Ha Woo 7d (Republic of Korea) and Hironobu Mori 7d (Japan) with seven wins; Slovenian representative, Gregor Butala 4d, finished 41st with four wins and the same number of losses. Though he improved on his last year’s result, he was not really satisfied with his performance. »The score may look satisfactory, but considering the strength of my opponents and the playing field in general, I cannot consider it a success. Also, my goal before this championship was to get five wins,« commented Butala after returning from Japan. Additional information about WAGC are on the official home page.
16th Team Championship of Slovenia took place on May 19th 2007 in Kranj, where Go Club Ljubljana successfully defended the title of National Team Champion. Namely, the first Ljubljana team (Gregor Butala 4d, Goran Šiška 4d and Timotej Šuc 3d) finished first after the five rounds of round-robin league, just ahead of Team Novo mesto (Leon Matoh 5d, Dušan Jukič 4d and Matjaž Jakopin 1k), which fell one victory short.
Third place was shared by Ljubljana’s second team (Eduard Ekart 5d, Andrej Kralj 3d, Marjan Drobež 2d) and Go Club Kranj (Milan Zakotnik 5d, Aleš Pogačnik 3d and Miro Mrak 3d), with the Maribor Team (Bojan Rojs 4d, Janez Janža 3d and Miklavž Mastinšek 3d) following fifth. Best players of the Team Championship were Leon Matoh (on first board), Goran Šiška (on second board) and Marjan Drobež (on third).
The traditional Slovenian Open, 19th Memorial of Lado Omejc, which was held from 20th to 22nd April 2007 in Hotel Astoria in Bled, was won by Ondrej Šilt 6d (Czech Republic), who was undefeated after all six rounds of the tournament. Second place went to Pal Balogh 6d (Hungary), who had five wins; Radek Nechanicky 6d (Czech Republic) followed with four. Best woman player was Rita Pocsai 4d (Hungary), who finished sixth.
The tournament was also the last event in the European Cup 2006-2007 (the latter was won by Pal Balogh: eleven points that he got for second place pushed him to the top of the overall standings) and landed rather strong field of players: out of twenty dan-level participants, a half were 4d or stronger. However, the biggest surprise of this year was the performance of Torsten Bringmann 1k, who won all of his games (and probably also his shodan promotion) and finished in the 12th place.
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