Many players are regular attendees of this event, they can confirm the positive points: very good hotel with spacious conference rooms, special low room rate for go players (only if you register early), relaxed schedule of 2-2-2 games where there is no 3rd round on Saturday night. At any time during the tournament, everyone could refresh themselves with various teas, which were offered free of charge to all participants by the tea room experts. And last but not least, a prize fund of 10k euro divided among all the grades, so about a third of the players take home a prize.
Spectators from all over the world were also in for a treat, as the top 5 boards from the tournament were streamed on the OGS website. The first two boards allowed automatic transmission to the internet and worked without a human recorder (our thanks go to Tobias Berben).
In the first round, although there were no easy wins in the top group, finally all the "stronger" players won their games. In the second round, we could follow some very interesting fights:
Ben0 - Yang Yaoling 1-0 (Yang won this tournament last year), Surma - Welticke 0-1,
Kim-Vazques 1-0 (after Ashe failed to kill Kim´s group) and let´s notice
Ali Jabarin - Lukas Podpera 1-0. Ali said a year ago: "I like Prague very much, however I have always a bad result here", Lukan used to be quite successful, this game reversed it.
Many interesting games followed, the first 5 boards in each round have been recorded, all 30 games are available to view & download.
In round 5, the two unbeaten players met: Kim Dohyup beat Andrii Kravets. Kim continued his performance in round 6 winning over Yang and so Kim won the tournament with a perfect score 6-0, Ali Jabarin of Israel came second and Andrii Kravets of Ukraine came third.
All results
Czech YouTuber Ondrej Kruml 6-dan commented a couple of games on his OhMyGo YT channel, the game between Benjamin D.G. and Yang Yaoling has a great english commentary!
We organizers appreciate very much the continuous support of sponsors, let´s name at least Old Hunter´s Whisky Distillery, Wube Ltd. ( both are owned by Czech Go players) and the Korean company Sungwoo Hitech, joined by several smaller sponsors.
Come the next year, we are ready for 200 players!
On behalf of the organizing team, Vladimir D