There was a time when a game between the heads of the Honinbo and Inoue houses would stir the blood - think of Jowa versus Genan, and the blood even curdles. But just to show that nostalgia ain't what it used to be, and to end our Shusai week, here is the last known game between the respective heads. It was an exhibition game to mark the promotion of Egeta Eiho (i.e. Inoue Tabuchi Inseki) to 7-dan in 1916.

Shusai played two other 2-stone games with Egeta on this trip, winning one and getting jigo in the other, but neither game record survives. These results against a 7-dan pro, and the earlier game at 3-stones against a 4-dan, perhaps put the recent results of the new European and US pros against Yi Se-tol in perspective.



Big things to look forward to from T Mark next week. Get your abacuses ready.

I got curious after reading this about how far Shusai was ahead of his contemporaries and what Inoue Tabuchi Inseki's 7 dan status meant. It turned out that this was only the second time I had used GoGoD + Kombilo to search for names rather than positions, so I doubt I found much of what there was to find.

I did this a few evenings ago, but didn't have time to write anything, so I'm going by memory.

Anyway, since there are (I think) few recorded games of Inoue Tabuchi Inseki, most of them against Shusai himself, I ended up looking at games between Shusai and other players. In particular, I found several games between him and each of Segoe and Suzuki. It seems around this time period they were 4 dan or so, and therefore took two stones from Shusai, but both seemed to have a substantial upper hand at that handicap.

No real surprises there, I suppose.

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Occupy Babel!

It's worth bearing in mind that by the time of Shusai, there had been no official support of go for 50 years, and the various go houses maintained their status (or not) based a great deal on how much they hustled to encourage sponsorship, etc. While the Honinbo family ended up fairly involved in the various professional organizations that eventually begat the nihon ki-in, my understanding is that the Inoue family were not terribly strong at the time and chose to maintain their school separately until their dissolution in the mid-20th century.