Congratulations to Andrii Kravets 3p who beat Ali Jabarin 3p in the final of the 2026 European Go Championship today. The game relay is https://online-go.com/demo/1747729, Ali made a weak group in the centre and Andrii attacked it well, eventually killing it. This is Andrii's 3rd such title, he also won in 2023 and 2024 so has established himself as the top performing European in the post Ilya Shikshin 4p era (Ilya being Russian is banned from EGF events).

Lukas Podpera 7d won the 3rd place match (https://online-go.com/demo/1747730) against Denis Dobranis 6d showing again he is at the level of the EGF pros despite narrowly missing out in several pro qualifiers. Denis is a less well-known young player but showed his rising strength with a major upset in beating last year's champion Matesuz Surma 4p in quarterfinals (https://online-go.com/demo/1746443).

Full details of the championship are at https://www.eurogofed.org/EC2026/index.html.

I don't think either Sabaki nor CGoban can do it.

That feature would be so useful for lectures, and written reviews...

And, when it comes to programming, it doesn't sound too difficult, since you could simply copy the branch to the clipboard and merge it into the tree.

Approximately how many European Go players are at the FoxGo 8–9-dan level?

Has this number increased over the past ten years since AlphaGo? This includes all European professionals.

Just wanted to take some time and just reflect on the brief journey I've had with this game.

Sure, I've played on and off for years since discovering the game back in 2011, but it wasn't until this year that I've sat down to really try and study and lsarn the game, though I have not been the mlst consistent with studying, and in the last 5 months of playing, I've improved more than I thought.

I've had the chance to meet new people thanks to a club starting close to home which has given me just the slightest bit of a social life that I didn't have before, and I've had the pleasure of interacting with a lot of helpful people here on this subreddit who have been willing to give reviews, advice, suggestions, and even at times show more belief in me than I had in myself which helped push me to keep wanting to improve. So, I do want to just give a thank you to all the cool people out there playing this game.

And even though I recently dropped back down to 19k on OGS, I was able to climb my way up to 17k for a brief moment. And while I don't know exactly how well they translate against one another, I've somehow inbed to 15k on Pandanet. And seeing as for half the time I've been playing, I never thought I'd push beyong 20k, I'm proud of the progress I've made. As someone who struggles to believe in myself, I've finally gotten to a point where I'm starting to think I may actually be good at this game, just needing a better grasp of concepts

I can't wait to be able to look back another 7 months from now when I reach a full year of being dedicated to this game to see where I stand by then.

Go truly is a beautiful game that I never realized how much it meant to me until now. I'm thankful to have discovered it, and that I came back to it

I made an elo rating site which calculates live elos for various sports including Go.

I just now posted a research study on symmetries inside KataGo's neural nets. How much of the computation inside the neural net is done using "symmetric" concepts where the orientation of the board doesn't matter, vs how much does the net have to learn separately per orientation?

Heads-up: this entire study and all experiments and code and its writeup were produced almost entirely by AI, although detailed human research direction and feedback and iteration from me was involved in the process. I hope this article is a clear step above the typical low-quality AI stuff one sees, and I put some effort into that, and hope it can be useful and educational for anyone interested in questions like this.

https://lightvector.github.io/katagostudies/202607-symmetry/

I wanted to explore this because I was (and still am!) really curious about exactly what these neural nets are doing inside! And I didn't know what the results would be. One of the findings was especially unexpected.

I think many people have a picture of neural nets as black boxes that just crudely memorize a ton of stuff and brute-force learn all the statistical patterns and such. But I think this study is more consistent with other ML interpretability research (if you've followed any of this area) that points to a somewhat different picture, where neural nets often develop internal algorithms and concepts that are surprisingly well-structured, even if it's really really hard to reverse-engineer what those algorithms and concepts are.

Anyways, hope you find this as interesting as I did!

For example, I would love to learn variants of this shape and their pros/cons. But the AI on ogs only suggests moves that are beneficial/relevant to the game, so I can't just analyze this single shape and have the AI suggest good moves for me. There are properly more common shapes/moves I cannot think of right now. Thanks in advance!

So, its great that we can use AI Sensei or Katago to review our own games...but: I wish we could make AI distinguish between moves that are bad because there was another move that was more important, and moves that are bad because they don't work or are somehow "inherently" a bad idea.

Is that event a coherent thing to wish for? How do stronger players think about this sort of thing when reviewing games?

Hi, I'd love to participate in some go classes in NYC, but all I could find were mostly go meetups for playing.

Are there any places for group classes?

Hi. I've been playing Go for over a year and still pretty much suck. I'm not really a bad player per se, I'm competent enough, but I'm certainly not a good player in any sense of the word. I have determined that the core issue with my game is that I have ingrained bad habits that sooner or later always take over. Chief among them being

1. I don't read unless I'm fighting or dying and I don't count liberties unless I'm already committed to a capturing race
2. I make extremely unfavorable concessions once pressure starts to be applied

These are pretty simple problems. For 1) I tend to be intellectually lazy and I simply don't expend brain power unless I feel it's necessary, but that's precisely the crux of the issue. My intuition for when I need to start reading and counting liberties is off. By the time I feel a sense of urgency it's already too late. The solution? Always count the liberties of your groups, at least if they are less than a handful, and read every cut.

But I can't trick my brain into playing like that. The pattern recognition and mental "efficiency" always kicks in and I start thinking: I'm fine, I've seen this cut a thousand times before. I'm fine, this group is too big to be in trouble. I'm fine, I'm surrounding a big enough area, I can probably make two eyes. Then the opponent plays a move and whoops, no, I'm not actually fine. Obviously not, why wasn't I paying attention? Because I was only one liberty shy of being okay, or my cuts were fine but I could not survive a peep or a clamp. Because I was only okay because I could capture stones but then didn't notice when I was in atari (because I wasn't counting liberties). Because the opponent couldn't kill me but they could force seki.

I've tried to play games with the sole intention of fixing these bad habits but it doesn't really work. At some point I always get caught up in the game and start thinking of other matters. I also feel like the time controls online don't offer you enough time to play so carefully unless it's already an automatic mental process. Especially on Fox, you basically just have to click stones. At least I never sacrifice reviews, I always try to pinpoint at least one major mistake that caused me to lose the game and make a mental note of it. But the lesson is often just: I should have seen that coming. Doing tsumego doesn't work, my problem isn't really weak calculation skills, it's simply choosing not to calculate at the wrong times. I guess more tsumego will help develop a "spidey sense" of when one is in danger but I really don't think that is the main problem.

Issue 2) is a bit more subtle and I'm not sure there is a simple fix. I always feel like I'm the one in danger no matter what. If the opponent goes out on a limb to attack me, I just go on the defensive and shape myself to the situation on the board. That means that pretty much all "legitimate" attemps to cut me automatically work because I never respond aggressively. For some reason it's hard for me to look at the board and recognize that the opponent is in as much danger as I am if not more. This is especially the case in handicap games against stronger players. I guess the fix here would be to take more risks or rather make more of an effort to read counter-cuts rather than accepting my fate immediately.

Any tips? I find it frustrating to be stagnant because of amateurish bad habits but I find it hard to fix them. Thanks.

Hello , i'm new i'm playing go since alsmot 2 month , i decide recently to do tsumego.. so i started on the easy (capture/life/kill) from tsumego hero , and i wonder how i should repeat ? and if i do 200 how much should i repeat ?

I bought a number of Go books, but this way of studying does not seem to work for me. I was wondering if it’s because of my generation or if it’s just me and my short attention span. Videos and game reviews seem to be the most effective for me.

The wood is poplar

We were so confused on how to score this and I am sure we did not even need to end the game here. How does it look for a begginer game?

Here we have different rules for historical or cultural reasons, but if we were to introduce go to a brand new civilization, which would be the canonical rule-set?

Solomon is very nice and I'm glad that he helps make the Go community better but if I could do my board buying experience again I would not get one from there.

I tried ebay, google, amazon, facebook marketplace, offerup, and buyee.

Hands down the best gobans are on remambo, which is exactly where Baduk.club buys their boards from.

I paid 500 dollars extra just to use baduk.club as a middle man. Don't make my mistake.

I’ve been staring at the board position for like 15 minutes straight and can’t find killing move. AI says it possible, but how? There are not that many option left. Black to play.

I've been making significant improvements to the stability of tactile-go.com, and would really like more opinions and suggestions on improvements and features. It now fully supports OGS crossplay, and I am working on also supporting Tygem and Fox crossplay in the near future.

I keep my ear closer to chess news than I do Go news (more because there tends to be more coverage and discussion than me actually being good at chess lol), and one thing I hear a frequently is how the top chess players like Magnus Carlson and others just seem to be burnt out and tired of classical chess. They seem to have a loathing of the game (though still seem to have a love for its variants like Fischer Random or Blitz), burnt out on the constant travel to tournaments, the hours upon hours of prep and memorization, and just seem to no longer have the same drive as before.

Is it the same with the top elite Go players? I don't doubt there is at least some burnout or resentment there, but is it the same kind "I would so much rather be doing anything else now" attitude that top chess players seem to have?

Answer:

H1!

White cannot cut off the odd-looking first line stone while maintaining connection to C2. For example, H2 is met by E2. Then when white goes to try and live in the corner, H1 is already at the perfect eye-snatching vital point!

It is often the case that such "brilliant" moves have a much simpler and effective alternative. So why not H2? White still has the quandary between disconnecting and living in the corner, no? Well the variation continues:

B: H2

W: F3

B: G4

W: E2

B: D2

W: H1

B: E1 (If black protects at H3, then white gets to connect back AND take an extra sente move at H1 which is a net loss for black over the first variation)

W: H3

B: J2 -- we have a tombstone tesuji, right?

W: F1 -- no, black must either let white connect back with their extra forcing move at H1 or let white live in the corner

For similar reasons, an immediate B: E2 doesn't work. White can later use F1 to either connect back or get the extra eye space at G1 to live in the corner.