Has it really escaped attention that this is the first (I think) international tournament with no Nihon Ki-in representation? Yuki and Sakai are both from the Kansai Ki-in.

Those with smart phones and iPhones can apparently get to watch the early round games from China via Cyberoro/Yahoo. This seems to be a novelty at this level.

And then people say Japan is so weak because they can't win an international tournament Good luck winning anything when you've got 2 chances out of 32.

Is there really any difference nowadays between the Nihon/Kansai Ki-in? Why don't they just merge?

Why wasn't Iyama seeded? It's mind-boggling considering his recent form. He should be participating in as many competitions as he can.

To clear up some confusion among discussion;

In Samsung Cup preliminary tournament, there were 28 players from Japan participating. And only 2 players passed and joined main tournament.

And then people say Japan is so weak because they can't win an international tournament Good luck winning anything when you've got 2 chances out of 32.

Is there really any difference nowadays between the Nihon/Kansai Ki-in? Why don't they just merge?

Why wasn't Iyama seeded? It's mind-boggling considering his recent form. He should be participating in as many competitions as he can.

Where is Qiu Jun?

To clear up some confusion among discussion;

In Samsung Cup preliminary tournament, there were 28 players from Japan participating. And only 2 players passed and joined main tournament.

I am not sure if the Samsung follows the same format, but for many tournaments, the number of seeds is based on past performance. So the underrepresentation is not exactly unfair. It would still have the bad effect of making results "sticky"--if your strength is equal, but you only had two representatives because of past performance, it would take a long time for things to rebalance themselves.

Far from clarifying, it seems confusing: there were >60 players from china and >110 from Korea. While I can imagine top Japanese players focusing on the more remunerative national title games, I cannot understand why other players would choose not to participate...

Actually, even if the japanese representative were the same level of other countries they would have less probability of winning. So they can only raise their participation ratio if they become much stronger than other countries, unless the "performance" is evaluated against the expectation (unlikely). If every game has a 50% probability of going either way the chance of a japanese passing the preliminaries was likely around 50% as well (did not do the exact calculation only an estimate). The chance of a top three is negligible. And I did not see any current or past top title holder in the preliminaries apart from O Rissei.

Several long technical digressions could happen here. I was simplifying, but actually I also think that what I said is technically true if you think about distributions of strength, rather than just "how strong the Japanese are".