You have no idea what you are talking about. One piece of evidence you should have known about: http://senseis.xmp.net/?StandardOpening1.

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Occupy Babel!

There are several good points in your post, but this has come up before and I think it's a mistake. It is true that much of Korea's extreme dominance is due to the two Lees, but that's not the same as saying Korea wasn't ahead. What are the numbers without Lee? Korea is still doing quite well (you also should cut off the best Japanese player to get a fair comparison).

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Occupy Babel!

I took his point to be more about network effects and the power of exemplars to inspire, rather than about applying the law of small numbers to the two dozen people who have won these big titles. (You may be familiar with the geographical clumpiness of philosophers...)

jts' interpretation is close to what I intended. Furthermore, playing strong players frequently makes you strong as well. Seo Bongsoo, who essentially taught himself go through gambling matches, went as far as to say that Cho Hunhyun is his go teacher and credited his many matches against Cho for his own success in international matches. That said, going from extreme dominance to "still doing well" also seems like quite a big difference to me. Nevertheless, I do agree with the broader theme of hyperpape's post, which I think is that we should be very careful.

This whole handicap stone, 4-4 point bit is nonsense and everyone knows it. There have been numerous rigorous studies that have conclusively proven that major determining factor in the strength of professional go players is national interest in professional baseball. I really don't want to go into it since I'm sure everyone on this forum is familiar with the work....but just in case there are some non-go players browsing the forum I will go through the highlights:

Japan has state-sponsored go, and is generally considered to have been producing the strongest players in the world up up through the 20th century. Up to this point there is no professional baseball in Japan. This is exemplified by the Honinbo house, who in 1908 was put under the charge of Honinbo Shusai...up to this point they have been essentially dominant in the go world. In 1933 Honinbo Shusai plays an upstart challenger Go Seigen in what would later be dubbed "The Game of the Century" - he wins, but barely. Less than a year later, the Greater Japan Tokyo Baseball Club (Japan's first professional baseball organization) starts , this is the beginning of the end for Japanese go. Over the next few years more Japanese professional baseball leagues have started and the influence is so great that by 1938 Shusai has completely retired. Professional baseball is still in its infancy in Japan and as such their go is still top-notch for decades, however there is a major turning point yet again -- in 1986 international play begins between Japanese baseball teams and Major League Baseball teams from the US. The strongest players are hit first and hardest, as exemplified by breaking Cho Chikun's winning streak in the Kisei title. He will not fully recover for nine years. The effect is so pronounced that by the time the first Ing Cup happens in 1988 no Japanese challengers can make the final. As baseball continues to grow in Japan we see Korea dominate through the late 90s, but unfortunately they learn of baseball's ill effects. Even though Korea has had professional baseball since the 1980s, it was only in the early 2000s, that the leagues were deemed strong enough to see significant poaching by the American leagues (Sang-Hoon Lee in 2000; Sun-Woo Kim in 2001; Hee Seop Choi, Jae Weong Seo, and Jung Keun Bong in 2002) this not-so-coincidentally aligns with the time period where Lee ChangHo went from invincible to merely mortal. Since then as baseball has continued to grow in Korea, their performance has leveled out and China (who's baseball leagues are not as strong) has begun to move into center stage.

It is also worth noting that the United States has had a very strong professional baseball program for over a century, and has had relatively little success on the international go stage. Recently there was a professional go program started for the AGA, and it has been largely attributed to the fact that professional gridiron football (NFL) and professional basketball (NBA) are stealing the audience from professional baseball (MLB). If the US hopes to truly compete on a global scale, we can only hope that baseball takes a backseat to other sports.

Lemmata, Jts: that makes total sense. Btw: I do think that "still does well" actually translates to "still is ahead of Japan, starting in 1993 (1995?)", but I don't have my counts from before.

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Occupy Babel!

I think it is interesting to note that Go Seigen was Chinese and that Cho Chikun was Korean, perhaps Japan for what ever reason can no longer attract the top talent.

[message to everyone here but the OP]

I go away for a few days and you keep going with this topic?

I'm disappointed. When someone defends a position obviously false or unreasonable, with no proof other than fallacies or insistence, it's either a troll or a kid (in the intellectual maturity meaning of the term). In either case, it's best to end it with "you're wrong" or with a simple silence.

Do any of you think someone can sincerely believe a professional go player may not know (to ridiculously tiny details) any go concept that you may fathom, just because he's Japanese?

The same will to teach that pushes you to answer the people who come and want to learn to play, which a small community like go really needs, also pushes you to make someone understand where he's wrong. However, that makes you extremely vulnerable to the simple concept of trolling.

At some point you must see it's unreasonable to answer with logic to someone who believes the sun is an alien spaceship.


OTOH, we're all bored from time to time, and answering trolls is often funny; reading what convoluted path they find to dodge our reason is entertaining. So I'll let you to your circus.

And if the OP goes away and you need more fuel, I'm ready to try to convince you Korean players are better at fighting because they use single convex stones. Or Chinese because go is communistic. Or that Americans will be the next champions because or their traditional racism between blacks and whites. Or Canadians, because they have good spruce wood. Or Spaniards, because they build good swords, required to make the lines in a goban.

Those arguments are all hogwash, it's baseball and everyone knows it. I've attached a graph to yet again illustrate this point (albeit in context of the US go, because the statistics are more readily available to me).

In this case I've used championship game viewership (World series and Super Bowl) as a proxy for national interest in the sport (Y-axis is in millions of viewers, the differential uses the right side axis). Notice how once the NFL begins to consistently achieve parity with MLB the US finally produces it's first professional go player. In the late 70s / early 80s we see a strong surge for the NFL -- right when Michael Redmond was training as an Insei in Japan. By the time we get to the late 80s/early 90's we see a peak in the difference which just so happens to correspond with strong tournament performances from Jimmmy Cha (who had been living in the US for nearly 15 years at this point) and Michael Redmond (who was well on his way to becoming a 9p).

I think people may be taking the whole "Board Game" concept a little to seriously, I mean just because you play go doesn't make you smart or anything, any way isn't their a thread about trolls somewhere, and why don't you go post on that topic. And well the Japanese are definitely doing not as well, and whether or not this is due to their inflated traditional handicap system remains an open question. Some people seem to value the traditional handicap system very much others, like the Chinese not so much.

Actually, it's not an open question. It's a funny joke though.

I think Mef's got something with the baseball.

You mean it's not?!

This is my first and last post here. SmoothOper tried to start a Pro-Java/Anti-Java war in another thread, with just about the same method. I'd do the same here that was done on the other thread: split it.

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a1h1 [1d]: You just need to curse the gods and defend.
Good Go = Shape.
Associação Portuguesa de Go

Xie Yimin and Cho U are Taiwanese who became pro in Japan. I think Korean and Chinese do not have a reason to go to Japan anymore as their own pro scenes are competitive and fruitful. Taiwan not so much, so I guess it makes sense for Xie Yimin and Cho U to go abroad.

The real issue is Taiwan's dominant performance in youth baseball. So long as they were consistently winning the little league world series, it was inevitable that they would have to send their best Go-playing youngsters abroad to study.

I went ahead marked this post as off topic since there is obviously no effort to tie in Phelan's association with anything that pertains to the thread. Thanks for playin.