The first game of the best-of-three British Championship 2016 title match was played last Saturday, between Junnan Jiang 5d and Charles Hibbert 4d, the top 2 finishers from the Challengers' league (as defending champion I qualified directly to the league but only managed 3rd place, losing to both Charles and Junnan (and Bruno, was a pretty bad tournament for me and the first time the defending champion didn't make the title match)). Charles had won their match in the Challengers', but that was somewhat lucky as Junnan made a blunder in the endgame: he played a descent move he thought was sente against the eye of a surrounding group before living with points rather than seki with his group, but it wasn't sente so Charles killed the group. Apart from a period in the late middlegame where one of his groups was floating in the centre and just managed to live with some nice use of aji, the game had seemed pretty comfortable for Junnan. Charles' only loss was to Alistair Wall so he was on good form (picking up enough rating to get from 3d to 4d), but I and most other people probably predicted Junnan to win (going into the Challenger's the assumption seemed to be Junnan was all but guaranteed to qualify and I would likely be 2nd, but I lost to Charlie in the 1st round).
A little background on the players: Junnan, as you might guess from his name, is Chinese and doing a PhD at Oxford University (material science I think) and this was the first year he was eligible to play in the championship, having lived here now for 5+ years. He studied Go as a child in China. Charlie, like Andrew Kay and myself, played at the Cambridge University club but was only low sdk when he graduated. He got stronger playing online afterwards and only played (and won) his first tournament a couple of years ago. He now lives in London and works as something like an actuary.
Anyhow, here's the game. Charlie won with some sharp moves in the fighting, the tesuji push of move 103 k10 was particularly nice to show off in a title match and recalled a famous tesuji of Shuei (though I'm guessing Charlie wasn't aware of it, he's not much of a bookish player).
Commentary was provided by Matthew Macfadyen 6d (25-time British champion and Oxford graduate, so even if Charlie wins this Cambridge still have quite some catching up to do in that traditional rivalry!)