So, the European go congress has played round 7 today, which means that they now enter the knock-out phase of the European Championship.

Four players have managed to score 5 points so far, and qualified directly for the final 8 KO. They are:

Fan Hui (2p)
Ilja Shikshin (7d)
Artem Kachanovskyi (7d)
Alexandr Dinerstein (3p)

Another 8 players, who have score 4 points so far, will play a play-off tomorrow (Wednesday) for the other four places in the final 8 KO. They are:

Cristian Pop (7d)
Ali Jabarin (1p)
Pavol Lisy (1p)
Dusan Mitic (6d)
Lukas Podpera (6d)
Cornel Burzo (6d)
Ondrej Silt (6d)
Csaba Mero (6d)

The KO will be played Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

So, who do you think will win it all?

EDIT: EdLee pointed out a confusing typo

EDIT: Striked through players no longer in contention

Ah, they now, yes.

Result of the play-off:

Csaba Mero defeats Cristian Pop
Ali Jabarin defeats Ondrej Silt
Pavol Lisy defeats Cornel Burzo
Lukas Podpera defeats Dusan Mitic

So there's 8 candidates left.

Quarter finals tomorrow.

Anyone know why Andrii Kravets wasn't in the play-off? He has the same SOS as Csaba and Ondrej. Maybe he had worse SOSOS or some other tiebreaker?

According to the rules: After SOS, ties are broken by rating (as it was at the start of the tournament).

Excerpt from the European rating list:

Next year we will have a new system in place for the championship

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North Lecale

How so?

In 2013 the AGM voted for this http://www.eurogofed.org/egf/agm2013propfr.pdf
A double elimination for 24 players running in parallel with the EGC main tournament. I'm surprised it proved popular.

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North Lecale

Gosh, that's quite a change. So for the first week the strong Koreans/Chinese will get bored beating up 5ds or playing each other, and only in the 2nd week will they play top Europeans. Also no weekend tournament/break for top 24 at the weekend, but they can attend for only one week so need less time off work/study. I can see that with the current system the bottom few of the top 8 who go through to the knock-out is influenced by the lottery of how many strong Asians you had to lose to, but such people rarely become the European Champion (Jan Simara the exception?). Also isn't playing strong Asians a good way to improve? I wonder what the top Europeans players think of this (not that they are homogeneous).

So the final is Fan Hui (no surprise) vs Alexander Dinerstein (bit of a surprise as he's not been so amazing recently, but an impressive dominating win against Ilya today). In some ways I actually want Dinerstein to win to counter the "he's a fake pro" whingers. But I'll stick with my vote for Fan to be the winner (he's 4-0 in head-to-heads).

OT: I always wondered, is Dinerchtein a pro hc or did he pass the regular pro exam in Korea?

Nervertheless, both aren't "fake pro titles". I also don't like these statements.

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go

Dinerchtein did not pass the regular pro exam in Korea.

"fake pro" may be a bad term, but I do think his status is lower than those of his fellow students who passed the test to become pro.

Then again didn't An Young Gil get promoted to 8p for moving to Australia to promote Go and people don't whinge about that.

I do find those promotions odd too but pro ranks are a bit odd in general.

Fan Hui won. A game Dinerstein would rather forget: he misread a net.