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Mark Lee won his fifth Cotsen Open title on Sunday, capping his 5-0 sweep with a convincing 123-move win over Andy Liu 1P. “Andy always comes up with new moves, so it was a pretty interesting game,” Lee told the E-Journal after the game. Lee won all five games by resignation. Although he’d been playing a lot of games with Korean professionals and insei before this year’s US Go Congress – where he came in third behind Eiko Kyu and Zhongfan Jian – Lee said he hasn’t had a chance to play much since, due largely to teaching duties with his students. He learned some AI moves studying with the Koreans but says he’s not planning on adding them to his repertoire just yet. “They’re very difficult to understand,” he said. “It’s good to change, but it’s going to be a lot of work,” he laughed. “Maybe I will try later.” This year’s title was especially satisfying, Lee said, “It was the toughest one yet,” due to the large and strong Open Section. “I was really happy to get a chance to play against so many strong players, especially since I don’t get many opportunities to play that many strong players.”

Winner Report
Open Section: 1^st: Mark Lee (5-0); 2^nd: Andy Liu (4-1); 3^rd: Evan Lin (4-1); 4^th: Xiaocheng Hu (4-1); 5^th: Calvin Sun (4-1); 6^th: Ying Ngai Yu (3-2).
Section A (4d-2d): 1^st: Kosuke Sato (5-0); 2^nd: Zhizhe Zhang (5-0); 3^rd: Ashish Varma (4-1)
Section B (1d-2k): 1^st: Tony Yang (5-0); 2^nd: Tommy Yinhe Liu (5-0); 3^rd: Andrew Luo (4-1)
Section C (3k-5k): 1^st: Billy Maier (5-0); 2^nd: Samuel Kennedy (5-0); 3^rd: Shawn Blue (4-1)
Section D (6k-10k): 1^st: David Su (4-1); 2^nd: Mario Espinoza (4-1); 3^rd: Viet Nguyen (4-1)
Section E (11k-30k): 1^st: Jiqi Wang (5-0); 2^nd: Michael Lee (5-0); 3^rd: Xiao Tiao Wang (4-1)

Club prize winner: Santa Monica Go Club

The E-Journal’s coverage this year included broadcasting top boards on OGS and videos on the AGA’s YouTube channel and Facebook page, including interviews with Eric Cotsen, Yilun Yang 7P, Richard Dolen and more