The Chinese Ambassador Cup ended yesterday in Moscow: https://gofederation.ru/tournaments/481496138 Few people believed it, I managed to beat Ilya Shikshin! We started to play each other in the early 2000's, he was just a little boy who didn't know much about Go strategy and just liked to kill groups. For many years the score was in my favor, but then the AI came along and Ilya was able to eliminate his main weakness in the game - fuseki. Now, as I have noticed many times, he is the strongest Go master in the world without Asian roots, surpassing even Michael Redmond himself. Ilya has an excellent reading ability, powerful yose, position evaluation at the level of the world's top professionals (there were games in which Ilya felt that he was losing 0.5 points and tried his best to complicate the game - and this, you must agree, is a high level sign). Since 2021 Ilya has lost only 2 games in tournaments - to Anton Chernykh and Alex Muromtsev. Since then he has taken 25(!!!) first places and one second place. As you probably know, I like peaceful Go, playing usually without too much risk and complications. 50 moves fuseki, 200 moves yose - that's what I do most of the time. With Ilya, this strategy doesn't work anymore. Over the last few years I've lost many peaceful games to him, where the position turned from equal to "minus 5" in yose. That was the reason why I tried to play in a way that was not my usual style - with complicated fights and unusual fuseki. I just tried to decide the outcome of the game without playing yose. My game with Ilya: https://goarxiv.org/game/view?id=260 On this website you can also watch other games from the tournament.
