There is some dispute as to whether you can be lucky in advanced games, like go and chess. It seems to me that, the less you believe in luck, the more likely you are to profit from it. Still, I am not sure how to explain my half point win in round two, and the last game, where my opponent seemed to be out of shape.

My fourth round game was my toughest so far:

In the fifth round I was paired against a 5dan, but he had a bad day. It might seem like I had an easy game, but I was very close to mess things up in the late middle game:

Today the Weekend Open starts, and I decides to take a rest from the first round, so I will hang around and enjoy the atmosphere until three o clock.

Today there was no round played in the open and I visited the Bach Museum, and the the Thomaskirche with my friends, and then the Mendelssohn-haus on my own. I won my game yesterday, and we spent the evening preparing for the Bach museum by listening to some… Bach. In the morning Jörgen and I discovered that there are numerous new videos with the Swedish composer Karl Birger Blomdahl on Youtube, whose music we share an affinity for. I love the violin concerto and J. could revisit ”Minotaur”, a piece he once heard on the car radio, and liked so much that he stayed in the car long after parking it.

One of the many things that I find wonderful with the go congress, is that there are professionals that can review the games with you. Yesterday we were not able to get ahead in the line, but tomorrow I will wait patiently.

Malmö go-club rarely see more than a handful of players on Wednesday evenings, so it is quite something that five of us are attending the European Go Congress:

Four of us have played in the tournament (so far), and our score is 5/8 after round 2.

Yesterday I won a hard fought game against a Japanese gentleman:

Today I was against a kid who played very fast, and well, in the beginning, but eventually I gained the upper hand. Then things got very complicated:

At the end of the game, I do not remember quite how, but I lost the ko, and cut off some of his stones at the bottom right instead. At the very end of the game, my opponent did not connect a ko, but played a dame-point instead, possibly because he was used to the chinese rule-set, and this allowed me to win the game with the smallest possible margin, 0,5 points.

We were three guys who took the night train from Copenhagen, through Hamburg, to Leipzig, and after some confusion about local transportation, we managed to get ourselves to the destination, Markkleeberg, just south of Leipzig. It is a far more beautiful and interesting place than the wikipedia article gave me reason to believe.

The first round of the open was played today, and Sweden had a reasonably good day: Fredrik Blomback won on board three, and much, much further down the list Victor Damberg, I, Marc Stoehr, and Roger Adamsson scored victories.

I tried to watch some of the others games. One of my compatriots got involved in a life-or-death fight after only a few moves, and I had to stop watching it, not to get drawn in too much. My opponent played solid and sensible, and my early try to complicate matters looked more like a tantrum than a well thought out strategy, but the eventually he backed off from complications one time too many, and I managed tomein with komi. I will post the game later.