Happy New Year, dear go players! I wish all of us strength in positional judgement, depth and speed in reading variations and, most importantly, enjoyment with our favorite game!

The stunning cover art of the September & October edition was made by Alizée Chabin, a French artist well familiar to our long-term subscribers.

This issue includes plenty of interesting material, here are the highlights:

• Reports and photo collages from the European Women’s and Student Championships
• Commentary on selected fragments from the two most exciting games of the 1st Kagaribi Cup – a match between European and Japanese (Kansai Ki-in) professional teams
• Review of the deciding game of the 1st World Strongest Player tournament final match between Dang Yifei 9p and Shin Jinseo 9p
• Li Ang 3p presents a precious item from his collection – a board inscripted by the legendary Honinbo Shusaku
• The next chapter of the “Mastering Ko” series by Dai Junfu 8d, Art & Photography and much more

The September & October edition is available in both digital and printed format on our website, I strongly recommend you to buy it if you missed it.

This month we plan to release our next issue, November & December. We already have more than five articles sent in by different authors, for example a report on the 2025 Australian National Go Championships by Bob Watson. Let me remind you that if you have any interesting go-related material you would like to share with our readers, feel free to contact us.

Following from its success last year, we want to make the European Go Yearbook for 2025 – hopefully, after the November & December issue if there will be enough time, otherwise slightly later this year.

There are a few important organizational things I would like to present you.

The logistics of the Ukrposhta, the regular Ukrainian postal operator we use for shipping, became complicated when Russia started its war against our country: civil aviation, including the one delivering post, is not allowed to fly anymore. All the post goes by land to a neighboring European country, most often Poland, and flies from there. This approach has been working well, although the shipping time has been slightly longer than before. In the second half of 2025, however, we received more complaints than usual about delayed or missing shipping in such countries as Great Britain and Germany. Trying to provide as low a price as possible to our subscribers, we dispatch the print copies of the Journal as a simple letter without a tracking number, so it’s not possible to say at which stage they get lost or are delayed.

These kinds of complaints were very rare before, and, as I appreciate the support our subscribers give our project, I always sent another copy without charging the subscriber, unless they offer to cover it. However, as the number of complaints has increased, I think it’s time to provide our subscribers a more reliable shipping option. I added two new subscription plans: “Printed Edition with Tracking” and “Printed Edition with Tracking, Gold Supporter”. They are €2 more expensive than the respective usual subscription plans. The subscribers who opt for these subscription plans will get a tracking number and link each time we send them a print copy of the Journal, which they can use to follow the location of their parcel. Let me take a moment to remind you that our Gold Supporters’ names appear on the last page of the Journal as a special sign of our gratitude for their support.

In fact, the “Tracking number” check box has always been there on our website for the readers who buy print copies of back editions of the Journal. Now we give the same option to our regular subscribers.

We also added the following statement to the information on our subscription and checkout pages: We are not responsible for the success of shipping. I recommend subscribers who experience any difficulties with shipping, to switch to a subscription plan with tracking. If you missed shipping of any editions published in 2025 or earlier, let us know and we will send you new copies free of charge. From 2026, it’s your choice what kind of shipping to use, but if some editions still go missing please let us know and we will try to figure out a financially optimal way to deliver you a new copy, for example together with some of the future editions. Alternatively, you can buy a new copy on our website.

Let me remind you that we deliver our print copies to any country in the world except for Russia, Belarus and a few more countries. The price of shipping is already included in your subscription or the price you see on the website, there is nothing extra to pay.

Meanwhile, I have also been thinking about a more financially optimal way to subscribe to the European Go Journal. Patreon is a platform with very nice and automated functionality, but it charges a commission from both the supporter and the creator. The supporter pays nearly 20% VAT. Our bank account and entrepreneurship are registered in Ukraine and all the taxes I pay here are already included in the price, but unfortunately there is no way to avoid paying VAT again via Patreon. The creator, in turn, is charged a commission, various fees for handling the currency conversion and handling the transactions, etc. Every party included in the process takes a bite from the pie, which in total also results in nearly 20% commission. For comparison, the payment engine that processes the bank card payments on our website charges only a 2% commission from the beneficiary.

The answer once again was already in the project. We have a few subscribers who asked me to transfer directly the payment for 10 editions or so in advance. When their subscription expires, I remind them and they make another payment if they want to prolong it, and so on. Now we officially offer the same approach to all our actual and potential subscribers. If you are more comfortable with an automated approach, opt for Patreon; if you prefer to be more financially efficient – select a number of editions you would like to pay in advance, contact us and we will figure out a payment method.

I invite you to visit our Subscription page. We have updated it with the new subscription plans mentioned above.

My team and I are happy to continue creating quality go content for you and to deliver it in the best way we can. See you in the pages of the European Go Journal!

Sincerely yours,
Artem Kachanovskyi 3p,
Editor-in-chief of the European Go Journal