51st European Go Congress, unknown koreans.

The tournament is not yet finished, but we can already say, what the winner will be Korean. This time Korean delegation is extremely strong. Few Koreans played the first week only, so we have only 4 Koreans (Park Jongwook, Hong Seokui, Cho Seokbin and Hong Seulki) in the main part of the tournament table. At least they cannot occupy first five places :)

Hong Seulki, 7-dan, who was the winner of the EGC in S.Petersburg made his road slightly harder by losing the game in the 7th round to Chinese girl Li Ting. He was leading a lot, but decided to kill her big group. Finally they made a big ko fight in the center and Li Ting, 6-dan won it, because she had more ko threats. She was very lucky! For taking the prize place Hong Seulki must beat some top Europeans, such as Cristian Pop, Ilya Shikshin, Pal Balogh and maybe others. Only lucky Europeans will avoid such a dangerous and angry opponent.

The pairing of the next round is not yet decided, but it may look like
Park Jongwook vs Yoshida Takao
Hong Seokui vs Li Ting
Cho Seokbin vs Lucian Corlan
Shikshin Ilya vs Cristian Pop
Alexander Dinerchtein vs Pal Balogh

The games on boards 4 and 5 are most important for deciding the European Champion, but it’s hard to say, will the organizers broadcast these games on IGS or not.

Few words about Korean players, who has 7-0 and 6-1 score:

Park Jongwook.
Former 1-st class insei of Hankuk Kiwon
Main achievement: Korean Chegoichon-2005 , 3rd place.
Few years ago in EGC in Prague he showed extremely good results by beating all of top European players. Unfortunately he did not get the first place that time, even with 9-1 score, because he did not started from the Supergroup. During the last few years he entered lot of quarterfinals of Korean amateur tournaments, but was often losing to top Korean amateurs. He lost several important games to Woo Dongha (Korean representative at WAGC-2007).


Hong Seokui.
Learned Go at the age of 7. He visited the ordinary Go school for beginners for few years. He lived in Chonchu city and was not able to enter the largest Seoul's Go clubs or attend Hankuk Kiwon inseis league. Later he learned Go from books and from real games. Nowadays he is often playing Go on Tygem server. He plays Go very fast and his favorite players are Cho Hunhyun, 9-dan and Yoo Changhyuk, 9-dan. Hong won several important Korean amateur tournaments, including Lee Changho cup-2002, Samsung cup-2005, Yahoo Game cup-2005 (after beating Hwang Inseong, 7-dan, who is very famous in Europe, in the final round). After winning the Samsung cup he got the right to represent Korean amateurs at the qualification stage of the Samsung World Go Championship. He met Mizokami Tomochika, 8-dan in the first round and lost that game.


In the main round of the European Go Championship Park won his game against Hong Seokui by 3.5 points. Few days later they met each other during the deciding game of the Week-end tournament. Hong took the revenge by 2.5 points.

This time we will present you the only game, lost by Park Jongwook during the EGC in Prague in 2005. We got this commentary from the collection of commented games on Go4Go. It was very exciting! Maybe his future opponents will study this game record and find the way of beating him. I will do it too!

More than 10 commented games from the Main tournament were uploaded to
http://www.go4go.net/v2/modules/alex/

Alexander Dinerstein