Dear EGF Members,

Well more than three months have passed since the AGM. It has been a
very busy time for the Executive outside of their EGF activities, so
I must first apologise if it seems things have not happened so fast.

Jan van Rongen and Matti Siivola attended a World Rules Conference 
in China (report sent previously), and since then Jan has been decorating
his house and only recently dug the box with the minutes notes out of the
chaos. I now have the draft minutes for checking, so the AGM minutes should 
be with you soon. 

My own big change has been stopping work in computers and starting a 
career as a Go Teacher. In addition I have taken on extra work for the
BGA, such as organising the UK Go Challenge for schools Go (see web site
www.ukgochallenge.com to see if you could use this system in your country).
Anyway it means I am fulltime working on Go at present. 

As always our players have been active internationally. The World Pair Go is
on this weekend in Japan, and last weekend the USA's Jie Li beat our own
Christian Pop in the qualifying game of the Seimitsu Cup. Christian, our
top amateur at the EGC, fought a very tough game against Jie on IGS. It
is worth looking at the game record. 

Of course IGS-PANDANET continues to broadcast games from the European Go Tour 
events, look out for them when events are on, and IGS is one of the EGF's
largest supporters at present. I understand some of the clients for
IGS have been improved recently and now that Jan van der Steen is our
own European admin, IGS should certainly be high among your preferred 
locations for online tournaments and matches, as well as for casual games.

To celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Nihon Kiin, Alex Dinerchtein
is playing an internet tournament against other pros later in the month 
on the Kiin's own new server.

We now have the dates of various events:

EYGC Kosice Slovakia   03-06/03/2005
Ing Cup Amsterdam      10-13/03/2005
European Pairs UK      23-24/04/2005
WAGC Nagoya Japan      21-29/05/2005
European Ladies Leipzig October 2005

The tour of Saijo and Catalin has now ended. Reports suggest it
went very well and we must thank Martin Stiassny for organising it
and all the local organisers for hosting them. There have been some
questions about the countries visited. The countries were selected
partly by request of the professionals and partly by ease of traveling
and by what could be arranged within a fairly short time. I hope you do 
not feel left out, but next time we can arrange other countries in plenty
of time. Our thanks of course go to both the Pros for all their hard work,
especially as I understand some of the countries made them work a little too 
hard without the promised days off.

If you have a project involving children or the use of Ing rules, then
do not forget the Ing Grants that are available. These are now being awarded
on a quarterly basis - see the web page for details. Also of course there
are many Ing sets looking for good homes, and we can provide other 
equipment such as demo boards for your youth projects. 

As you may recall from the AGM the Commissions were disbanded, and would
be set up as demanded by need. Soon we will be setting some up, so please
watch out for requests for volunteers to help with some valuable EGF tasks.

May I wishes best Go wishes and hope to see some of you soon (London).
AJAx 12/11/2004