Xie (Hsieh) Yimin 5p defeats Mukai Chiaki 4p for the second time making 5 years in a row as the Women's Honinbo. The previous record was Yoshida Mika 8p who held the title for 4 years in a row from 1993-1996. Chinen Kaori 3p also help the title 4 times, but only for 3 years consecutively.

http://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/match/2011/1 ... 024_1.html (Japanese)

Doesn't look like the previous years were close matches for her, either:

29 2010 Shei Imin 3-0 Mukai Chiaki 6.5
28 2009 Shei Imin 3-1 Aoki Kikuyo 6.5
27 2008 Shei Imin 3-1 Suzuki Ayumi 6.5
26 2007 Shei Imin 3-0 Yashiro Kumiko 6.5


So, this gets her, uh, 5.8m Yen, and, uh...the right to stay 5p? What else?

Are women's promotions not done the same way as men's? I'm curious how a woman wins the Honinbo 5 years running and remains 5p.

they are. but only winning big open titles matters for promotion. otherwise you have to earn promotion based on number of wins or amount of money won. see NihonKiInNewPromotionSystem

it is fair, because even though Xie rules the Japanese female scene, she hasn's achieved any big success in open tournaments yet

and i would nearly forget: congratulations, Xie Yimin, i am your big fan!

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I might be wrong, but probably not.

Hmm. I was checking out her games in GoGoD, and noticed that (as of Dec 2010) she won 68.6% of her games as white but only 50% as black (out of 99 games total). I should probably subtract off the pair go ones, but it won't make much difference.

There are some games where she entered the prelims for the larger open titles, but she's getting knocked out early in many of them. I guess the 6 dan bar is pretty hard:

Promotion to 6 dan
Win 90 games as a 5 dan
Win most or second most prize money amongst 5 dans

She has to get more games, I guess. The prize money thing is also a challenge...

Just last week she advances to the 3rd round of this years NHK. Its the first time (in my short record keeping) any woman has advanced past round 2 in the NHK

In round 3, she will face the current title holder, Yamada Kimio 9p

She likely will be the most or second most prize money winner among the Nihon Ki-in 5 dans this year. I mean she is ahead of all 5 dans in the winning statistics even if you discount all the games in women titles (which are not eligible, she went 7:2 this year). Personally, I believe we will see her as the first female 9 dan in Japan sooner or later.

Yes. Given her age and performance, it's not out of the question that she could win an open title, and if she does, she'd have a decent chance of making 9 dan. But I wouldn't necessarily put either at above 50-50.

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She didn't remain 5 dan, she was 3 dan when she won the title the first time. I don't get how people assume with > 200 wins already (and she is young) that a mere 90 won games would constitute a major obstacle. I would expect her to be 7 dan within 5 years (you can raise by prize winning), from there on you have either to win titles or very many games.

I think Kobayashi Izumi did it earlier in 2002 NHK. She beat Kato Atsushi in r1 and Hane Naoki in r2 before losing to Mizokami Tomochika. But, maybe Xie is the first to did it twice.

Looking forward for her next game

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She won't remain 5d, yes. The issue is that to go from 7 dan to 9 dan by wins alone, you need 350 wins. At 15 wins a year, that's just over 23 years. That's doable, but it requires a long and steady career, and won't happen for many players if they reach 7 dan too late. So it matters quite a bit if she gets an automatic promotion to 6 or 7 dan or whether she spends a decade grinding out another 200 wins.

Like I said, I wouldn't be shocked to see her win an open title some day. It does depend on how close she is to her peak strength, but she's among the better players her age.

Btw: I know it's been discussed before, but do the women's titles count towards the 90 wins for promotion?

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And she advances to the quarterfinal round by defeating Yamada this weekend!

She'll be facing Hane Naoki in the quarterfinals.

I don't see why they shouldn't, but I don't think there's a clear answer for that.

She's been averaging 28 wins a year since 2006 (according to Mr. Kin's records), so I definitely wouldn't be surprised to see her eventually become 9 dan by wins alone.

The only problem is that she's sort of handicapped herself; being the holder of the three titles, she doesn't have to participate in prelims. If she had to start from scratch every year, she'd have another possible 20 wins. For example, in 2007, she went 40-16 mostly because she had to start from the knockout stages. Also, there was another title then, Female Saikyo, that has since been defunct.

I wonder. This game was played over a month ago, so the game against Hane Naoki may have happened already?

sure, but we just don't know the outcome yet.

While this is kind of true, average wins do not mean very much. She consistently had a positive record and has to face tougher competition every year, the question is whether she can maintain this positive record against the better competition you see in the final preliminaries and soon main tournaments instead of the early preliminaries.

Has anyone a kifu of the game against Yamada Kimio?

It hasn't yet been published on any of my favorite sites yet, but I transcribed it from the NHK site
http://cgi2.nhk.or.jp/goshogi/gotou/

She clobbered him in only 109 moves
109手　黒番　謝依旻女流本因坊の中押し勝ち

That looks exactly like the kind of game that makes me avoid the mini-chinese. Interestingly this is identical to Ryu Shikun vs. Cho Chikun until move 18 (Meijin tournament 2003). From W24 it goes downhill very rapidly for White. Anyone any ideas or analysis on the game? Was W20 too deep already?

According to Valerio's update she will be promoted to 6 dan from February 1 for winning most prize money among 5 dans. (I don't find it on the Nihon Ki-in page yet.)

In this week's Go Weekly (cover date February 6) they have the final top ten money winners for 2011. Xie is number 6 (JPY 20 million), behind Tako Shinji and ahead of Cho Chikun. It is her fourth straight year in the top ten (due to her dominance of the ladies tournament scene the article notes).

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"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
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