The European Youth Goe Championship (EYGC) 2010 was held in Sibiu/Romania on the weekend of 4-7 March. As my son Oliver Wolf had not visited his relatives in Germany for some time and being a German passport holder and thus eligible to take part in the EYGC we decided to link both. The excitement of the trip started 30 hours before departure from Toronto when we found out that his passport has expired 2 weeks ago. Fortunately the German Consulate in Toronto was able to issue a new preliminary one on the morning of the flight. 3 flights and 16 hours later we arrived in Sibiu. One more personal comment. When exiting the plane in Sibiu one could see the Făgăraş mountains in the far distance, reminding me of a hiking tour through the closer Cindrel mountains as a student 25 years ago. Sibiu is a nice city with a distinctly Germanic feeling, as it was the largest and wealthiest of seven citadels built in the 12th century by German settlers known as Transylvanian Saxons. In 2007 Sibiu was the European cultural capital. Part of the opening ceremony on the evening of arrival were a welcome address of the organizers, among them Catalin Taranu (5P) and of honorable guest Saijo Masataka (9P) who in the next two days gave lessons on basic techniques and discussions of games played at the tournament. The music programme performed by artists from the local Confucius Institute and a Romanian folklore group were excellent, although we were very tired, having skipped sleeping the night before on the plane. In the past the Ing foundation did sponsor the EYGC. Although this sponsoring ended the tournament was still run under Ing rules because the World Youth Goe Championship (WYGC) runs under the Ing rules and the EYGC determines the participants of the WYGC. Being run as a McMahon tournament an initial playing strength had to be decided which is normally done by the entry in the European Go Players database www. Oliver did not have an entry, he registered as 1kyu (having won against European 1d and 2d in competitive games but also having lost against 1k players not too long ago). The tournament was split into 4 separate tournaments: U12, U16, U18 and Open. The three winners of each the U12 and U16 groups were to get free tickets for the WYGC this year on 20-28 July in Taiwan. Oliver is 10 years and played in the U12 which I want to comment on only. In the first game Oliver was paired with the top setting Mikhail Sidorenko (3d) who was featured in a goama article last year as a very promising young player who was the winner of the EYGC in the previous two years and who already repeatedly won against 4d and 5d in tournaments. He also won against Oliver. The next 3 games against single digit kyu players from Russia and Romania Oliver won with 60-100 points. In round 4 it came to a duell between Mikhail Sidorenko and Anson Ng from Hong Kong (keyboy 3d on KGS). Both had not lost a game in the first three rounds. In the endgame Mikhail overlooked an atari and a chain was captured with the consequence that Mikhail lost this game in which he was leading. On the next morning he announced to retire from the tournament. According to tournament officials this seemed to be influenced by his mother who accompanied him. In the 5th round Oliver played Anson and lost by about 10 points and afterwards won his game in round 6 against Alexandru Pitrop (Romania). At the end Anson Ng was the only player with 5 wins followed by 5 contestants with 4 wins and 2 losses. The retirement of Mikhail was unfortunate for those who had already played him (Wolf, Popov, Ng) other players with finally 4 wins did not have to play Mikhail and with only 3 wins Mikhail's contribution to the SOS value was low resulting in a 4th place for Oliver and a 5th place for Stepan Popov (1d) whereas 2nd place was shared by Alexandru Pitrop (4k) and Silvestru State (6k) both Romania. Full details are available on http://frgo.ro/15th-European-Youth-Goe-Championship . With the prize giving also the free tickets for the WYGC in Taiwan were awarded, three tickets in each of the groups U12 and U16. Tickets were awarded purely on the basis of McMahon points (= number of wins + an initial number of points based on the initial placement in the top group). In case of equal McMahon points a draw decided. In the U16 group two players had to draw for one ticket and in the U12 group 5 players had to draw 2 tickets. Apart from Anson Ng the two lucky recipients were Alexandru Pitrop and Vladyslav Verteleckyj (9k). The tournament was a great experience, I exchanged ideas about Go-teaching with parents of other players and Oliver made a good friends in Sibiu, for example, with the french team. We also had not met the team from Germany before although starting for the same country. One week later happened to be the German National Youth Go Championship in which Oliver played too - for the first time. The tournament was very well organized with very cheap delicious food prepared by the families of the organizers and free private accommodation. Oliver scored 6th in this U18 tournament (http://www.dgob.de/tourn/tourn.cgi?f=10dedjgm.txt&mode=cml) which was won by Lucas Krämer 4d (KGS miao 5d). Oliver's best game was a win against Andre Städtler 3d who was the only one to win against Lucas Krämer. On the other hand in the first game against Moritz Keilmann 4k a comfortable lead turned into a 3 point loss for Oliver due to loosing a larger chain by an endgame slip (too fast playing). Quick playing helped though in the 13x13 self-pairing tournament which Oliver won with 7 wins out of 10 games. This was a side event of the 26th Castroper Go tournament held at the same time and place with 88 participants. I want to conclude by thanking Chuck Elliot for organizing the CGA league which was crucial for Oliver to make good progress over the last year. Thanks also go to James Sedgwick for commenting on Oliver's games in the last round of the CGA league, and Tiger Gong, Franz Josef Dickhut (fj on KGS) and Benjamin Teubner (alhambra) for preparation games and last not least Robert Jasiek (sum) for online teaching over last year.