Fan Hui and European players. Who can stop him?
Fredrik Blomback 5 dan EGF played against Fan Hui 2p in the first round of The Paris Go Tournament. Fredrik is a well known player on KGS (Fredrik 7d KGS), we have seen him defeating Du Yufeng 3p in an even game, so it was reasonable to assume that Fredrik would at least put up a fight. But the game ended on the 67 move! Fan Hui sealed white's group on the side leaving no room to live thus forcing Fredrik to resign. Some observers watching live broadcast on KGS didn't even believe that the game was already over at this stage.
It is apparently that Fredrik misread but he is not the first to lose to Fan Hui. We covered The Ing Memorial 2009 where Fan Hui gradually beat all top European players. It seems that Fan Hui is too strong for European players nevertheless according to Mr. Lee Kibong, 7-dan European players should be happy to have strong opponents as without the strong Asian players there would be no one to compete against. On the other hand a lot of strong players in Europe complain, that recently there are too many Asians, so the title is rarely depends on the games between Europeans - you have to beat some Asians as well, or get lucky pairing instead. I believe it's a matter of time to see if the current system of the European Championship is effective or not.
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