By Damir Medak | Articles | 09.06.2018 18:48| Views: 5654
This year, the Croatian Open Go Championship became a Level C Bonus Tournament in the European Grand Prix. Altogether 46 players from nine different countries played in the tournament. This was an increase of 50% compared to the previous edition in 2017. It was an excellent opportunity for the top Croatian players to play in a tournament with young members of EGF Academy. The largest and strongest tournament in Croatia since EGC 2002 started smoothly on Saturday, 26th May 2017, in the air-conditioned classrooms of the Alojzija Stepinca Elementary School. After the 1st round, the principal of the school led a reception, attended by a lot of school teachers and parents.The top group consisted of 8 players from 4d to 7d, playing in a separate, quiet room. The games on the first board were broadcast on KGS (user name: ZGRGP2018), which significantly increased the visibility of the event. Two beautiful EGC 2017 boards were used for the top two boards, although the top players did not really like their “yellow” yunzi stones. The tournament in Zagreb was a testbed for 10 new DGT byoyomi timers, which proved to be a better choice for Japanese byoyomi than the “old” DGT 2010, which beep only during the last period.
Catalin Taranu, 5p, helped players with the analysis of games they had just played. After each round, the results, and the pairings of the next round, were instantly published on the website.
After five rounds, the winner was Stanislaw Frejlak, 7d from Poland, winning all his games. Matej Zakanj, 4d from Croatia took the clear second place with four wins. Dominik Boviz, 5d from Hungary was third, although Sinan Djepov, 5d from Bulgaria, and Elian Grigoriu, 4d from Romania, scored three wins as well. These five players scored bonus points in the European Grand Prix: 8 points for the 1st place, 6 for the 2nd, 4 for the 3rd, 2 for the 4th and 1 point for the 5th place. The table with European Grand Prix points for 2018 can be found here.
It should be noted that Petar-Tadej Tukara, member of Croatian team for the International Mathematical Olympiad 2018, who started to play last year, won all five games as 10 kyu, gaining almost 300 rating points! The three best players in each category (U12, U16, and U20) got medals.