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This year, two EGF professional players from Poland took part in the 6th MLily Meng Baihe Cup World Weiqi Open – Mateusz Surma 4p (European Champion and Team champion 2025) and Stanislaw Frejlak 2p (European Team champion 2025).
This tournament is among the most prestigious international events, featuring the top players of the world. The first step (besides qualifiers) of the event, is taking place in Beijing, China, from August 15th (round of 64) to August 19th (round of 16).
Players can be directly seeded (top players from various countries, previous champions and wildcard) or went through qualifiers or direct national selection (the case for Europe this year).
Stanislaw shares with us a few impressions from the event.
This year’s MLILY Cup takes place at the Zhongguo Qiyuan headquarters (“Chinese Nihon Ki-in”). It’s located in Beijing next to the Temple of Heaven. As both me and Mateusz arrived in Beijing one day in advance, we went for a walk in a large park around the Temple.
At the opening ceremony, players drew numbers to decide pairings of the first round. As the sponsor of the tournament is a producer of soft mattresses, the numbers were put on small sponge cubes – a nice souvenir for the participants.
Mateusz with his sponge cube and the number 1 which usually fits him well.
We didn’t get an easy pairing. Mateusz played Fan Yin 9p. He tried to provoke a fight and the game finished with a capturing race in which the Chinese player had more liberties.
Mateusz, white, enjoying a comfortable very slight first-move-default half-point-ish lead.
Ding Hao 9p vs Stanislaw much before anything spicy happened in that game.
I faced Ding Hao 9p – Chinese no. 1 according to the Chinese professional rating. Early in the game I left a bad ajj in my corner and my opponent immediately used it to get a useful second-line stone in sente. Later on, looking for an opportunity to turn the table, I cut my opponent’s stones in the center but in turn, my group on the side got cut. Everything ended with a compromise but my opponent kept his advantage and my position never recovered.
Thanks a lot to the players for their feedback! One more good experience and training to get stronger!
Thanks as well to Tygem reporters for the photos.