This year's European Championship started today, who do you think will win it this year? Last year Pavol Lisy won for the first time, beating 5 time champion Ilya Shikshin in the final.

The fill list of participants and tournament brackets (it's double elimination until quarter finals then knockout) is at https://www.eurogofed.org/egc/2019.html

An upset today: Lukas Podpera (black) beat Artem, also Viacheslav Kaymin beat Stanislaw Frejlak. Otherwise games went as expected.

And now Podpera beat Tanguy Le Calve.

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Occupy Babel!

Would not call Lukan's win against Artem exactly an upset due to his really solid score against him, but no disrespect or offense against Artem, he is a beast!

Ah, I didn't realise that Lukan had such a good 6-5 head-to-head record vs Artem, his style must work well. Just going by ratings Artem is about 100 GoR above which would usually lead to quite a lopsided expectation at these high levels.

So as one might have guessed Ilya, Mateusz and Pavol are straight through to the quarter finals with 3 wins and get 2 rest days, with Lukan the only non-pro joining them.

Ali, Dusan, Tanguy and Viacheslav get 1 rest day, whilst people with 1 early loss including Artem and Stanislaw keep fighting tomorrow. Antoine Fenech is doing surprisingly well for a 5d who's dropped to 4d, beating 6ds Csaba Mero and Ben DG. Also youngster Oscar Vazquez is doing well, beating Nikola Mitic and Andrej Kulkov, he faces Artem next.

Oscar played really well and was leading against Artem for most of the game, but unfortunately om late endgame losing a dame liberty set up a problem inside his group (I'm not sure if he didn't see it or counted it as so close he could't afford to answer).

The final tomorrow is Ilya vs Artem.

Lukas was doing well vs Ilya with a lead on territory but some weak groups. The bots thought he was head as they could find ways to settle the groups without hurting each other, but Lukas couldn't handle Ilya's attacks as well so he lost:



Stanislaw's game plan went awry in middle-game when he sacrificed some stones to try to attack another group but it easily lived and he ended up with nothing.

Ilya swept EC 6-0 and will break 2800 once again, congrats!

Ilya was black won by half a point! (record not complete)