I dont have the means to back up my gut feeling with statistics, but Kim Jiseok seems to have an absurd winrate with white.

Great game (link)

Can anyone provide statistics? Whos the king of white? ...black?

http://igokisen.web.fc2.com/kr/korea.html

not exactly what you want

_________________
Amsterdam, soon.

In 2012, in the games GoGoD has, Kim Chi-seok scored 21 out of 29 with White and 18 out of 32 with Black.

Going back to the period 2010-2012, he also did better overall with White (47/71) than with Black (41/75).

Your observation is correct. Kim seems to win a lot of games while playing white. I have 310 his games at http://www.go4go.net/go/games/byplayer/862

I wrote a few queries to get what you want from the database:

as black, he won 79 out of 151 games. 52.3%
as white, he won 109 out of 159 games. 68.6%

I think my sample is large enough. He is indeed very strong while playing white.

I believe Kim is what An Younggil calls an "infighter", a player who makes a lot of small fights so this will tend to lead to low scoring games without huge territories so the komi counts for more and explains his good win rate with white.

Do you think that might suggest that the komi value is actually too high?

No, I think komi is probably about right now, it used to be too small. There are other pros who still prefer black (e.g. Gu Li IIRC), but Kim's style evidently works particularly well as white.

From last summer's GoGoD (not the newest) career results:

Kim Chi-seok as Black
132 matches, B: 51.5%, W: 48.5%
Kim Chi-seok as White
139 matches, B: 33.1%, W: 66.9%

Gu Li as Black
555 matches, B: 60.7%, W: 39.3%
Gu Li as White
489 matches, B: 33.9%, W: 65.8%

Yi Se-tol as Black
442 matches, B: 69.0%, W: 30.8%
Yi Se-tol as White
445 matches, B: 31.2%, W: 68.8%

Cho Chikun as Black
967 matches, B: 62.4%, W: 37.3%
Cho Chikun as White
976 matches, B: 39.3%, W: 60.0%

Note that Cho played many more games with lower komi than the others.

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

Thanks for sharing! It makes me want to get GoGoD. The message I get from that data is that Kim lags behind other top players when he plays black (which may indicate a weakness in fuseki compared to other top players).

You may be familiar with the boxing term. It makes a game of go sound quite violent, doesn't it? Cho Hunyun in his younger days might have been a typical outside fighter. Someone like Won Seongjin might be a counter puncher, given that he plays thickly and attacks severely when the chance arises. There must be many brawlers.

I wasn't, thanks.