Andrii Kravets 3p (UA) just successfully defended his title of Pro Champion, by winning all his games in the Tsinghua Weiqi Foundation Cup - 9th European Pro Championship played on March 5-8 in Bucharest, Romania.
Right after the event, barely allowing the freshly crowned pro the time to celebrate, we rushed with questions to get "hot" impressions!

Hello Andrii and congratulations on your victory! The second in a row for the Pro Championship, wow. How does it feel?

I'm happy to win for the second time in a row. For me, this tournament is the second most important tournament of the year. I'm also happy with the quality of my games — in most of them I managed to get a lead early on and keep it until the end.

Did you prepare for the tournament?

Before the tournament I took a break from Go for almost a week. I didn’t do any tsumego and didn’t play any games, just to refresh my mind.

Were you looking, or, on the contrary, not looking forward to playing against someone? 

in Europe we play against each other a lot and know each other very well. I think I enjoy playing against the pros — each of them has a different style, and you need to adapt your play every game. That makes it more challenging but also more interesting.

An interesting game of the championship, in which Benjamin played his "well known" fuseki, trying to drag Andrii into a controlled game. Andrii adapted and took the lead.


When you're at 6/6 and you know you're the champion already, do you feel like you can just play softer, the pressure is gone, or are you even more eager to win with a perfect score? 😄

When I reached 6 out of 6 I felt relieved. Overall it wasn’t that important whether I won the last game or not, but I had my own motivation to win. First, I lost a game to Ali half a year ago in the EGC weekend tournament in a bad way — with a one-move blunder in the endgame. The second reason was that if I won, I would surpass Artem Kachanovskyi 3p in rating and might move to the first board in the Ukrainian team for the Pandanet European Team Championship.

Will you go to China for the Chinese League C team tournament, as a player from the Tsinghua University - European team? Do you feel that you've become stronger since the last time and can beat a couple of Asian pros this time?

About the Chinese League C, I most likely will not go: flight prices increased drastically due to the war in the Middle-East, making it very difficult to go to China.

I think I have become stronger compared to the previous year. Before, I often had some problems when I was leading because I tried too hard. Also, games where I gained a lot of territory from the beginning were difficult for me to handle. Now I have improved that part of my game and I feel more confident in these kinds of positions. I also think there are hardly noticeable, yet existing results from doing a lot of tsumego and watching a large number of professional games.

As for the asian pros...when I was playing on the second board two years ago in the Chinese League C [read here] , I felt like I was close and only needed to make one small step to catch them. Last year [read here] I played on the first board, and many of my opponents were in the top 300 in the world. It felt like even when I played my best games it still wasn’t enough, and I lost by 0.5–3.5 points. I have definitely become stronger in the last year, but I’m still not sure if it’s enough yet to compete with these players.

Thank you for your answers, Andrii and good luck on the next steps of your go journey!