This Saturday 27th November will be the British Championship 2021 title match, between Daniel Hu 5d and Bruno Poltronieri 3d. The game will be broadcast on KGS in the British room, with an audio commentary by me, Andrew Simons 4d aka Uberdude.
Due to Covid we didn’t have a championship in 2020, and this year rather than having the usual qualification process of a Candidates tournament and then all-play-all Challengers league for the top 7 plus last year’s champion to decide the top 2 for a best-of-three or -five title match, the top 2 British qualified players from the British Open in October were selected to play a single title match game. Those 2 players were Daniel and Bruno, you can check the results at British Open Results 2021 | British Go Association.
Daniel is certainly the favourite: his 2498 rating is 1 and a half stones higher than Bruno’s 2343 and that’s probably under-rating Daniel: he had a spectacular success in the 2020 EGF Grand Prix Final just before Covid hit beating 2 European professionals Tanguy Le Calve 1p (2695 rating) and Pavol Lisy 2p (2763), and he qualified for that by being the first British player in decades to win the London Open 2019. Daniel has been British Champion once before, he beat me 2-0 in 2017. But Bruno did beat Daniel in their head-to-head game in the British Open last month, so don’t count him out! He’s been practicing ahead of his first shot at the British Champion title.