The just-concluded 2011 Russian Pair Go Championships featured the strongest field ever, reports Alexandr 
Dinerchtein 3P, who also participated. “For the first time in history Svetlana Shikshina 3P (front left), took part, paired with her brother Ilya Shikshin 7D (back left) and it was quite obvious from the start that it would be too hard for other pairs to fight with the Shikshins team” and the siblings indeed swept the tournament 5-0. Dmitriy Surin 6d and Natalya Kovaleva 5d, the strongest Russian and European pair for many years straight, shared second place with Artem Dugin 5d and Aigul Nureeva 3d, from Kazan, both pairs scoring 4-1. “I like Pair Go very much,” Dinerchtein (back right) tells the E-Journal. He started playing at the Pair Go tournament in the European Go Congress in “1999 or 2000. At that time my partner was Julia Solomatina 1d from Moscow. We did quite well and even beat Saijo Masataka sensei and his 1k partner in even game.” He and Elvina Kalsberg 4d took second place in last year’s European Pair Go Championship and in this year’s Russian Pair Go Championships he partnered with Daria Koshkina (front right), a 3k from Yaroslavl who’s one of his students in Korean style Insei League on
KGS. “In the third round we played against the Shikshin-Shikshina team (see game record). To everyone’s surprise we were leading at some point in the middlegame, proving that Pair Go is enormously different from the normal game. I noticed that even the two siblings had very different plans and it was quite hard for them to understand and follow each other. Check Black moves 51-53, for example when Ilya invaded and Svetlana played on the other side of the board.” Dinerchtein says playing in the Pair Go tournament “was very exciting and I will surely take part in Pair Go tournaments again. Try it too, if you haven’t played Pair Go before. It’s fun!”
