I put the top players from each nation up.

Please post if you voted for a player not listed!

This is the first year in a while that my honest answer is that I don't even have an opinion. Some years, I might have said it was a tie, this year, I just don't know.

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Occupy Babel!

I am not strong enough to say who was the best this year. However, I can vote based on who impressed me the most.

Iyama Yuta blew me away with his games. Every one of them I studied was awe-inspiring. The other players listed are all great, obviously. I can't pick out a clear "best" but from a purely subjective perspective I think Iyama Yuta was the best player this year. I loved his Oza series against Cho U. The first game in particular.

Choi Cheolhan is easily a close second for me. His games have been fantastic. This game right here between he and Chang Hao was easily my favorite match of 2013. By move 49 I was horrified for white. Then the rest of the match was beautiful and amazing as Choi worked his way to a solid victory.

Kim Jiseok also surprised me. He was not a pro I was generally aware of until later this year, but now I look forward to each of his games that I review. I still remember his game against Lee Sedol back in April that I took a look at. He was apparently promoted to 9 dan just a couple of days after that game. I didn't even know who he was at the time, and didn't see his name again until later on, but his play in that match was fantastic. I only looked at it because it was a Lee Sedol match.

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"You have to walk before you can run. Black 1 was a walking move.
I blushed inwardly to recall the ignorant thoughts that had gone through
my mind before, when I had not realized the true worth of Black 1."
-Kageyama Toshiro on proper moves

If we look at international tournaments, the Chinese swept them almost clean. Hence it makes sense to look more closely at the Chinese tournaments. Here we see that Chen Yaoye holds 2 titles. However, when digging deeper, we also see that he did not participate in many of the other tournaments. There is a player who did just as well as Chen Yaoye in number of titles and who also came close in a number of others. This name is dearly missing from the list.

My candidate is Zhou Ruiyang.

(To be honest, Chen or Park Jungwan are just as fine, there's really no player outperforming the rest).

I don't have a clue, but I could not see the result without making a choice so I just picked a random name.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

End of year Chinese ratings, (by a guy who doesn't speak or read Chinese):

1. Shi Yue,
2. Chen Yaoye
3. Wang Xi
4. Gu Li
5. Zhou Ruiyang
6. Tuo Jiaxi
7. Mi Yuting
8. Fan Tingyu
9. Tang Wei
10. Tan Xiao

Like most ratings, they do not precisely say who performed the best over the whole year.

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Occupy Babel!

I thought I could edit the poll and add "Undecided".

It erased the votes. Woops!

Just below the vote button, is a hyperlink for "see results" so the initial problem wasn't, errr, a big deal.

I find all the votes for Iyama Yuta before the vote purge curious, because he hasn't ever won a major international tournament, just one blitz title. How can you claim to be the best, when you don't beat the other candidates on the world stage? That said, I didn't vote because I just dunno.

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- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

Interesting. Either that was not there or I tried it and nothing happened. I forget which. But I definitely tried to see them without voting.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

I voted Iyama because, maybe he wasn't the best in the year, but he had a really impressive year. Not because he won against everyone else (which he didn't, in the international scene at least)

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

Fair enough, just a different interpretation of the question. I took it as who was "strongest." But "most successful" is another way to interpret "best."

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- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

I agree with you about all the Iyama votes. His game records look stronger and he gathers more tournament wins(and cash) because the competition in Japan has been proven over and over again to be weaker. However, this is a totally subjective poll; none of us could possibly determine who is actually the strongest.

Nevertheless, I encourage posters to do things like look up domestic results, study some title games, or look at head to head matches and make some educated votes. I thought there would be a clear favorite, the results so far(before I accidentally erased them) weren't what I expected.

I didn't want to get into checking all korean and chinese tournaments (I've been mildly checking who won that, though,) because in any case it would lead to picking the best in China, the best in Korea and the best in Japan... a year without everyone playing everyone makes it hard to gauge.

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

Well OP has announced that, per his definition, best player = strongest.

Because China won all but one of the international tournaments in 2013, doesn't that mean the strongest player was likely Chinese?

I'm not saying who is strongest at this very moment, I am just proposing that given the way the question is worded, I don't see how 2013's strongest player wouldn't hail from the country that won virtually all the international contests.

How's that for a stake in the ground?

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- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

It's a stake in the ground, but I'm not sure it's a correct one. The skill level differences between the top players is very thin. No one will argue right now that there are more high level Chinese players and as a result, they will win more tournaments.

That doesn't specifically mean the best player is not Korean or Japanese though.

Ah, the old human wall theory. Great masses of Chinese go players overwhelming everything in front of them. Strong kids picking up the stones of their fallen, older brethren in a quest to be the last man standing. I suppose that if different Chinese players won the international tourneys, as they did, that would add credence to your argument. I need to consider this one for a while.

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- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

Well, all else being equal, you would expect that the world's best player would be more likely to come from the country with the highest go-playing population, which is probably somewhat correlated to actual population in countries with a history of playing go. If, hypothetically, 66% of the world's go players come from China, you would then expect that the world champion would come from China roughly the same proportion of the time.

Now that China, Korea, and Japan all have serious professional training programs with demonstrable results, I don't think that there will be a decisive advantage to one program or another in the future, aside from the pool of players they have to draw on for their talent.

Park Junghwan and Choi Cheolhan were the best among captains in Chinese A League 2013 with impressive 13-4 and 15-3 score. And they also won the 13th Nongshim Cup for Korea.

To play devil's advocate, I would imagine the strongest player would use his strength to earn the most money, and not necessarily worry about which tournaments it came from. Under that assumption, all the votes for Iyama Yuta make sense.

That is ignoring a lot of important facts.