Every year during our European go congress (EGC), the European go championship (EC) is organised.

Due to the COVID19 pandemic the 2020 EGC couldn't take place in Ukraine. Hence, the European go championship was cancelled, and we lost our funding for its prizes.

The EGF Executive board suggested that the EC instead be played online on OGS with video recording of the games via Skype:
Also, an anti-cheating commission managed by Antti Törmänen was put in place in case of any disputes.

To make sure that our strongest European go players will participate, especially our EGF professional players, we need to offer money prizes as they live from their go activities.

We would appreciate your donation, even if it is a modest one, to enable this even to happen:

https://www.okpal.com/egf/
Latest news from the European championship (as of October 9th 2020):

This year the number of players (32) was kept the same, but with a different tournament set up.

There are 2 preliminary qualification rounds before entering the main tournament. There the 8 players who passed through the qualification rounds will compete against the top 8 seeded players.
As games are played on OGS at different time slots, it permits the other EC players to watch and comment the games live, which never happened when the championship games are played simultaneously. This is really appreciated by game observers as commentaires and variations suggested by other strong players are of great added value.

In the 1st qualification round, only one main surprise was the win of Javier-Aleski Savolain 5 dan from Finland who won by 1.5 points against Timur Sankin 6 dan Russia .

Now, the second qualification round is ongoing until October 13th. Already ,another surprise with Lucas Neirynck 5 dan from Belgium who won by 1.5 point against Alexander Dinerstein 3p Russia.

The schedule of the games is visible here:
https://www.eurogofed.org/egc/2020.html

The final phase (semi-finals and finals) from October 22nd to 25th will be played with a best out of three games. Live broadcasting with EGF Professional commentaries will be on EGF YouTube channel. (cost will be 2€ / game or 10€ for all games and free for the 2020 EC donors > 10€)

Jean-Yves Papazoglou

EGF VP