Pavol Lisy, European champion 2018
The European championship was organized this year in Pisa, along with the European Go Congress.
This competition is reserved to the 32 best European players.
The system is a knock-out tournament with 2 "lives (till the 1/4 of finals).
The favorites were of course the 7 participating pros. Nevertheless, two of them failed to reach the quarter of finals:
* Andrei Kravets (UA), who lost in the 2nd round to Thomas Debarre (FR, 6d) and to Cornel Burzo (RO, 6d) in the looser's pool
* Alexander Dinerstein (RU) who surprisingly lost already in the 1st round to Johannes Obenaus (DE, 6d) and in the looser's pool to another pro, Ali Jabarin (IL).
Thus three amateurs (7-d): Dusan Mitic (RS), Cristian Pop (RO) and Stanislaw Frejlak (PL), joined five pros in the quaterfinals. But all lost, respectively against Shikchin, Surma and Lisy (proving the gap between pros and amateurs). In the only pro duel, Ali Jabarin eliminated Artem Kachanovskyi.
In the semifinals, Ilya Shikchin got rid of Mateusz Surma while Pavol Lisy prevailed on Ali Jabarin.
By beating Ilya Shikchin (RU, 2p) in final with 2,5 pts, Pavol Lisy (SK, 2p) became European champion 2018, succeeding to Ilya, who was reigning champion since 2016.
Ali Jabarin ended 3rd by winning the "small final".
Here are the complete results:
https://egc2018.it/en/european_championship.html
PS: our compatriot Lucas Neirynck (# 29 in the EGC ranking list) has the right to compete, but was promptly eliminated with all the honors : he lost in the 1st round to Mateusz Surma (PL, 2p) - one of the "big shots" - and in the 1st round of the looser's pool to Anton Chernykh (RU, 6d).