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ROUND 1 HIGHLIGHTS: Thailand Surprises Romania, Canada Routs Russia

Here are highlights of James Davies’ Ranka Online report on the first round at the WAGC: Kamon Santipojana 4d of Thailand surprised Lucian Corlan 5d of Romania when the 21-year-old Thai student took command of the game early…As previously reported (NO SURPRISES AT TOP IN PRELIM 1ST-ROUND WAGC RESULTS), Canada’s Yongfei Ge 7d defeated Alexey Lazarev 6d of Russia when the closely-matched game turned into a hard-fought rout, with Ge beating Lazarev by 24.5 points…See below for the game, with commentary by Michael Redmond 9P (at left with E-Journal Managing Editor Chris Garlock).

The evenly-matched contest between a pair of 3-dans from Mongolia and New Zealand also turned into a rout when the Chinese-born New Zealander, 15-year-old Kaikun Xie, easily forced opponent Oyutbileg Tsendjav to resign. Boonping Teng of Malaysia “outplayed me in the first part of the game” said the United Kingdom's T Mark Hall, complaining of severe jet lag, 'but then he made a blunder in a ko fight at the very end.'…The game between Csaba Deak of Brazil and Daniel Baumann (r) of Switzerland, both ranked 1-kyu, took a similar course, when Deak also "blundered (in the end) and had to resign."…Perhaps the last closely-matched first-round game was also fought between kyu-level players John Gibson (2-kyu) of Ireland and Carlos Leon Rios Joels (1-kyu) of Peru. 'I'm going to play quickly because I'm hoping to exploit my opponent's nervousness at being in his first world championship,' said Gibson.
 Click here for Ranka Online's complete report.photos by John Pinkerton [sgf sgfUrl="http://www.usgo.org/news/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Lazarev-Ge-Redmond.sgf" href="http://www.usgo.org/news/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Lazarev-Ge-Redmond.sgf" class="alignright"][/sgf]