This year it was the first time when Europe and America faced each other in an official professional go match. Five players participated from each side. The tournament had a ‘win and continue’ format, similar to the famous Nongshim Cup. All games were played online with live commentary on Twitch. You can see all the details on the official tournament website.

The European team consisted of five European Go Federation professional players:

America’s team had five American Go Association professionals:

At first Mateusz Surma 2p (Poland) won three games in row, leaving only two American pros left in the competition. You can read interview with Mateusz after the first two rounds. You can find game records there as well.

In the fourth game Mateusz played against Eric Lui 1p (USA). It was a hard case for the referee: Mateusz ran out of time due to lag, even though Mateusz had made his move in time (Mateusz’s proctor could vouch to this). In the end, the referee decided that the result should be Mateusz’s loss by time.

In the next two games, Eric managed to make the score even, beating Ali Jabarin 2p (Israel) and Pavol Lisy 2p (Slovakia). After the bright 3:0 start for Europe, America was back in the match with a 3:3 score.

In the next game Artem Kachanovskyi 2p (Ukraine) finally stopped Eric.

As Artem couldn’t play the next game with the given schedule, the European team used the substitution rule, and in the next game Ilya Shikshin 3p (Russia) played Ryan Li 1p (Canada) instead of him. Ilya won, and America had no players left in the team, while Europe still had 2 players left: Ilya and Artem.

Thus, the European team won the title of the Transatlantic Champion and a generous prize money of 10,000 Euro. Congratulations!

More details including the game records you can find the article on the EGF website written by Artem Kachanovskyi.

Report by Artem