The 4th Pandanet Go European Team Championship is starting shortly. This season we have a record number of 32 teams, including the new entries from Greece and Iceland (Welcome!). League C is quite busy with 12 teams and they will be starting the games first, in 17th September.

The games schedule is quite lively, every Tuesday there’ll be games on Pandanet/IGS – excepting the major tournament overlaps and holiday seasons.

The leagues and countries are the following:

League A
Czechia, Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, France, Romania, Serbia, Sweden, Finland and Israel.

League B
Austria, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Poland, Italy, Slovakia and Slovenia.

League C
Switzerland, United Kingdom, Turkey, Ireland, Spain, Croatia, Bulgaria, Portugal, Cyprus, Kazakhstan, Greece and Iceland.

The 1st rounds: League C 17 Sep, League A 24 Sep and League B 1 Oct 2013. The website http://pandanet-igs.com/communities/euroteamchamps will be updated shortly with the new teams and schedules.

Good luck to all teams and players!

Vesa

The first round this evening, 17th September, starting 18:00 CET/CEST. Check the latest GoPanda2 client and login to Pandanet-IGS EuroTeamChamps room.

League C has new members, what kind of go they play in Greece or Iceland?

http://pandanet-igs.com/communities/euroteamchamps

Cheers,
Vesa

And today the first round of the League A, featuring

Russia – Finland (Tuesday, 19:00 CET/CEST)
Czechia – Israel (Tuesday, 20:00 CET/CEST)
Ukraine – Sweden (Tuesday, 20:00 CET/CEST)
France – Romania (Tuesday, 20:00 CET/CEST)

Hungary and Serbia already had their match yesterday.

http://pandanet-igs.com/communities/euroteamchamps/rounds/144

Cheers,
Vesa

Greece has one guy who is 2d KGS (used to be higher) but seems like in recent has stopped playing as much as he used to, a guy who is 1d KGS (also semi-retired) and a couple of guys who are 1k-7k KGS. So i guess the kind of go we play is crappy :p
From what i know Iceland is not much better either.

Hello,

I made a prediction of League C. It can be found here: http://www.eurogofed.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=71

UK vs Turkey tomorrow probably decides winner of league C.

hello,

More predictions this time for League A: http://www.eurogofed.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=80

Enjoy.

It is quite hard to predict what the results of the league matches will be. It is not really the same as a tournament, where you have the weekend free, you are relaxed, you have your preperation in hand. In the league, for a lot of players, I expect they do not always have time to prepare, and are not always relaxed. A busy day in work can often mean you are only just home in time to play your game; this was definitely the case for me in seasons 1 to 3.

In your comments as to Ireland's performance in round 1, I sense that you believe teams are training for the matches, doing post mortem reviews, etc. Actually we don't do any of that. I wonder if Ireland are alone in that aspect?

Next year I expect that there will be a League D, because we keep getting new teams, and League C will become too big.

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North Lecale

Actually it this comment was made before I did performance calculations on a player-level. The analysis was done on average GoRs of the teams. Ireland should have been able to beat Cyprus. I comment of shortage of time was simply refering to the time league C had to put together a team for the first round. Ireland did only manage to field 3 players that round so they had to work uphill from the beginning. I do not think teams spend time on specific training, preperation or analysis. I captain Denmark so I know how things work (at least for us).

League B predictions http://www.eurogofed.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=83

Especially concerning league C all those predictions are a bit iffy to say the least. Many players have so few games under their belts that the rank they declare is questionable. Also in most matches where the playing difference is too great a prediction is useless since the outcome is profound. Also in the word file you don't take into consideration the fact that many players haven't/won't play at all therefore lowering the GOR and damaging your estimation. So let's see how good your predictions are.

League A Round 4
You missed the Israel-Serbia and Russia-Ukraine matches. Actually the latter match you missed it by a mile. So from that round you missed 2 out of 5 matches.

League B Round 4
You missed the Slovenia-Poland and Germany-Netherlands matches. Since you already knew the outcome of Italy-Denmark you missed 2 out of 4...

League C Round 4
Kazakhstan-Croatia, Greece-Spain, Iceland - Portugal and Cyprus-Bulgaria results were to be expected. For the first two games even a moron could predict the outcome. For the other two the result was also profound but i'll give you some credit since you got the exact result. For the Switzerland-Ireland match i guess you nailed it (even though Switzerland was the favorite) but the result of United Kingdom-Turkey you completely missed it. Even if we don't take into consideration the cancelled game you didn't get a single game right.

As the rounds go by the statistics will become more significant and you might get better or luckier which defeats the purpose of this but whatever

Soon all the speculation will come to an end as the last rounds in the 4th Pandanet Go European Team Championship will be played out.

The schedule for the matches on Pandanet-IGS:

League A, Round 9, 13th May
League B, Round 9, 20th May
League C, Round 11, 27th May

Or check the news at http://pandanet-igs.com/communities/euroteamchamps.

Cheers,
Vesa

The pairing of league B has worked out really well. In the last round, both the top two teams and the bottom two teams will meet.

Woohoo! Netherlands beats Poland 3-1 and advances to A league!

We had a really good year, really proud of my team here!

UK stay in league C We started well but after that loss to Turkey we lost quite a few games and matches we shouldn't have by rank and ended up 4th.

I should pump up my rank so I can join Spain. Or relocate

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

Is there any reason why most of the players in Spain don't seem to want to play in the league?

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North Lecale

I have absolutely no idea, it's quite puzzling indeed. I don't frequent my local club (only for the Barcelona tournament), nor I'm much in touch with the Spanish community (just being part of some mailing list and twitter) so I don't know the particular reasons, but indeed, the stronger players seem to be absent (IIRC at my current EGF level I could be one of the last reserve boards, it's as bad as that.)

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

The spanish team is doing very well, despite being one of the weaker teams in paper. I think the ranks in Spain must be very harsh for kyu players! If South Africa join league C next year, I think they will have to split it into 2 groups.

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North Lecale

Yup, we've talked about it here: sanniti (KGS 4k) is Spanish EGF 8k, alejo (KGS 5k) is Spanish EGF 10k and I (KGS 4k) am Spanish EGF 9k. So... Seems so, at least given a small sample of players

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net