I agree with Krama that the decision was more about facing a strong opponent. There might be an impression that Gu Li has long passed his peak, particularly after beaten comprehensibly by Lee Sedol in the jubango. But he is still very strong, as shown by his official rank - he is No. 4 in China and holding his score well.

I am quite aware of Gu Li's status as China's 4th ranking player, and certainly he is still elite. I still think the decision had everything to do with the opportunity to potentially challenge for a world championship. We'll have to agree to disagree.

Also important to consider, it might be as invalid with go as it is in chess to consider "stronger than" to always be strictly transitive. Perhaps somebody would care to look at statistics to determine this?

Does A usually can defeat B in a match and B can usually defeat C in a match necessarily mean that A can usually defeat C in a match? For all the top player triplets A, B, and C.

Or do we sometimes find, for some A, B, and C, that this isn't true (the reason can be difference in playing styles; some players can do better against some playing styles than other playing styles.

Thus possibly Gu Li has more trouble with Lee Sedol than he does with other top players. Again, somebody might want to do the work of comparing statistics.

Interesting statistics between 3 Chinese players here:

Gu Li 22-8 Zhou Ruiyang (quite a gap)
Zhou Ruiyang 14-3 Chen Yaoye (dominant)
Chen Yaoye 15-10 Gu Li (upper hand)

Prior to the jubango, Gu and Lee were tied. Even now, Lee has a small margin. I actually think Gu looks better compared to Lee directly, than looking at their records overall (16 international titles for Lee, 7 for Gu).

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Occupy Babel!

When collecting such statistics one should be mindful of over what time period the games were and whether the players were in their prime then. Gu Li is somewhat older than the other two, so perhaps he got a lot of wins beating up a young and not yet full strength Zhou Ruiyang.

The players I was thinking might be part of a good example would be Chen Yaoye and Choi Cheolhan as Chen used to have a very good record against Choi (9-1 in their first 10 games) but Choi seems to have learnt how to deal with Chen's style better now and has won 7 of their 8 games since.

Final game 1,


Gu Li defeated Zhou Ruiyang by resign.

Final game 2,
Gu Li defeated Zhou Ruiyang by 1.5.




Gu Li is Chunlan cup Champion..........