On the weekend of 04-05 March, The Irish Confucius Cup was held in Dublin, Ireland. Tournaments in Go, Chinese Chess and Chess were combined together to make this big event, as well as other activities such as commentary by professional players and simultaneous games. Thanks to the generous sponsorship and good organizers, everything was well prepared, the ambiance during the tournament was really enjoyable and it was all happening in the very nice venue in the heart of Dublin’s city center.

Therefore, the tournament attracted not only a lot of top European professional and amateur players, but also special guests Guo Juan 5p and professional players from China, Mr. Yu Ping 2p, Mr. Chen Rui 5p.

The Go tournament was part of the European Grand Prix Level B event and consisted of 5 rounds. The thinking time was 60 minutes plus 5x30 byo-yomi. Altogether, 47 players (from 15 countries) participated in the main tournament, eight of them were 6 dan and above.

The top Go board from each round was broadcasted on the OGS server (user’s name: IGABroadcast) as well as on KGS (user’s name: Javaness) and a video stream was also available.
The top five players were rewarded with cash prizes of 1000€, 400€, 300€, 200€ and 100€.


The winner was Kim Seong-Jin 7d, the young Korean player, who recently started to participate in big European events and is pretty successful. In this tournament, he won all his games, although he had a very close game with Pavol Lisy 1p. Kim Seong-Jin defeated him by only half point and therefore Pavol Lisy became second with 4 wins. The third was Mateusz Surma 1p, as he won the last decisive game against Christian Pop 7d.
Full results are available here.