I see your GoGameGuru link and raise you: http://gogameguru.com/experience-trumps ... msung-cup/
Three of the four semifinalists are Korean.

Any competition trying to figure out right now whether Korea or China is stronger is rather pointless. They are extremely close on the international stage.

I see your link but it somewhat negates the BC link since, Baek Honkseok was the only Korean semi-finalist, so China is still better head to head this year.

"All of China’s hopes are on Gu Li

Gu Li, the only remaining Chinese player, must be feeling a lot of pressure.

I’m sure he’s hoping to emulate Baek Hongseok’s determined win at this year’s BC Card Cup, where Baek was the sole Korean semifinalist."

This has got to be one of the dumbest arguments we've had on this site, and we've debated for 10+ pages over the definition of "brilliant" before.

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Because I prefer to believe that SmoothOper is trolling than entertain the possibility that he seriously believes this nonsense he is spouting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

The only thing more surprising is the number of people who think ninrensei is a good opening because Takeyama won once in the 80's and that Japan is the epicenter of good go traditions. Of course Uberdude, Splatted, etc won't comment on how dumb that is

Who is Takeyama and what is "nin"rensei? Do you mean Takemiya and/or nirensei? Sanrensei?

Ah yes excuse me. I didn't mean to disrespect Takemiya in that way If you would be so nice as to address the more substantial part of the argument I would appreciate it thanks.

What is your argument? I don't think anyone quite follows it. We've explained before that handicap placement has nothing to do with it.

No one addressed my rebuttal that while pros generally don't play handicaps in tournaments they probably use them while training in there dojos. Furthermore people always cite that Takemiya won with ninrensei as an argument for the traditional placement, so it seems like it ought to be established that this may have been only a fluke, and that neither is the Japanese tradition very good or ninrensei a very good strategy since they aren't able to really win with it at the top levels in modern play.

In their study sessions, they would never use handicap. Japanese players also rarely use nirensei today. From recent experience at looking at pro games, if anyone does use nirensei, it's as white and more likely to be a Korean or Chinese player. Takemiya's influence was to make sanrensei popular. However, I haven't seen any Japanese players use that at the top level in quite a while.

and now ez4u can drag out all the cool search algorithms for fuseki...

No


Really? I've never heard that. And even were it true it has no relevance to the issue. Plus traditional handicap placement predates Takemiya by at least a few centuries.


What?


It is true that black rarely plays nirensei today as the big komi means he tends to play at least 1 3-4 point to get territory. White often uses nirensei for a speedy opening. I am not aware of national differences here.

Actually I did, several times

I don't think anyone has mentioned this in the thread. I certainly diddn't

Do you have any statistics to back up this statement? I would like to hear what ez4u has to say about the statistics
Edit:
I also am not sure what the relevance of nirensei is to the discussion we are having.

I liked this post and wanted to agree with it. But then I checked the latest in the Logical Players, Intuitive Players topic and thought, "Hmmm..."

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You said something to the effect that Japanese were more successful when they played the traditional handicap less, which I thought was a very interesting point, however I didn't see that it followed that they were some how able to over come traditional handicap training during tournament play.






The chart in this thread. In fact is relevant because it show who has been winning recently in some, but not all international matches.

Sorry, I decided this thread is too over-the-top 'trollish' for any attempt at rational discussion.

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

I said they were more successful when they played 4,4 points less in even games. this would suggest that an over reliance on 4,4 joseki is not their cause of playing poorly


Interesting quote but not relevent. The argument presented is not reliant on the Takemiya point. It could be removed completely, it is completely irrelevant.



This chart only demonstrates that Japanese won earlier and Koreans/Chinese won later. This is something we agree on so citing it is irrelevant.
edit: @ez4u: fair enough

I think this thread is clear evidence that the control panel makes it too difficult to figure out how to censor people.

Uberdude: Baek won the latest Asian TV title. The Asian TV title is played under blitz settings. I am not sure if it deserves a place in your table given that it only pits the three winners (+three runner-ups) of the biggest blitz tournaments in CJK against each other. It is a tiny tournament.

Passing thought: Rather than Korean dominance, I think that the period in the middle should be described as Lee Changho's dominance (followed by Lee Sedol's dominance). Gu Li has had a similar effect. Remove any one of those names and everything changes too much.

The large red swath in the 2009-2010 needs interpretation given that Lee Sedol did not play during the last 6 months of 2009. He was also not quite himself after his return, despite winning the BC Card Cup.

I'd say things are a bit even right now, although Chinese dominance seems inevitable to me. There are far more Chinese people, they have government support, the opportunity cost (distribution of potential earnings in outside option professions) of aiming to be a pro is lower, lower median income levels make alternate forms of entertainment comparatively more expensive then they are in JK, go players in China do not necessarily have to worry about two years of military service, etc... I personally attribute Korea's golden age to Lee Changho. In addition to dragging a blue paint roller across Uberdude's table with his wins, his dominance essentially led to a huge boom in Korea. The fact that a military dictator threw a car parade for Cho Hunhyun when he won the Ing Cup also had some positive PR effect as well. At any rate, people like copying successful people, and Lee Changho was successful like no other player before or since. In some sense, I believe that the Koreans were just extremely lucky to have Lee Changho be born in their country and have him trained by their strongest player. One day, perhaps one great Japanese player on par with Lee Changho will be born. That might be all it takes for Japan to return to prominence.

I view these sort of threads with some worry. As we saw, there were some unfounded cultural generalizations being made earlier. Actually, they were more like unfounded caricatures that implied some sort of cultural superiority on the part of one culture over the others. That's pretty disturbing. I look forward to the day when computers dominate go so that the nationalistic proxy dong-measuring contest aspect of international competition is never seen again. Then again...perhaps we will be discussing the ways in which the superiority of Czech mothers makes the Czech Go computers dominate the Mexican ones.