As usual for me, everything began one day before the start of the tournament.
Packing the necessary materials (the laptops, and the cables, and so on) so that we would be able to transmit all the games via KGS, Youtube and a live transmission on-site for all the players in the 9th Berlin China Cup.

This year's Grandslam brought two new surprises for us:
1. A new sponsor - Yike.
2. The time controls for the tournament used Fischer time.

On Thursday, we had a small opening ceremony for the Yike Cup. All the players for the prelimimary stage were present, and they were responsible for the lottery which decided the pairing of both the preliminary rounds and quarter-finals. The first upset in the tournament took place on this day.

Alexander Dinerchtein 3p from Russia lost against Dusan Mitic 6d from Serbia.

In all the other games, although we saw close hard fought games, the expected winner survived.
For the first time Andrii Kravets managed to win a game where I was the scribe, in each of the 6 games before he had lost.

On Friday the quarter-finals were played and once more Dusan Mitic was the centre of an other upset when he beat Artem Kachanovskyi 1p from the Ukraine.

Then on Saturday we had a big opening ceremony where both the 9th Berllin China Cup and Yike Cup officially started, and the Professionals from China were introduced to both the players and the public.

That day the tournament was divided into two parts, on boards 1 and 2 the semi-finals were played and on boards 3 and 4 the places 5-8 were going to be decided. With one of the favourites already eliminated by Dusan Mitic, the now expected final was reached when both Ilya Shiksin 2p from Russia and Pavol Lisy 2p from Slovakia managed to win their games.

Sunday, and in a hard fight Ilya was able to beat Pavol (the european pro-champion) and thus collect this year's Grand Slam and Yike Cup titles.

All games were shown live daily on KGS and one board was also broadcast live on YouTube and Twitch. On-site daily, some games were commented by Catalin Taranu 5p from Romania, and from Saturday onwards the chinese professionals also commented games, and played simultanous games.

Next year, we expect to have a much bigger event for the 10th anniversary of the Berlin China Cup (a large team tournament is planned) and the 5th Grandslam Yike Cup.

All results can be found here.

Many thanks should go to the Chinese Cultural Centre who provided us with a beautiful playing site and lots of help from the staff of the centre.

And ofcourse we should not forget the initiator and motor behind all the new sponsors and tournaments. His daily work just to promote go Europe is outstanding.
Here all I can say is Martin thank you for the time you sacrife for us to have more and a higher level GO-BADUK-WEIQI in Europe.

And shortly after the tournament we got an other surprise from one of our professionals.