What kicked GoGoD into existence was the discovery of the Korean edition of the collected games of Go Seigen in the Hankook Kiwon bookshop in 1992. For a year or so I imported the books from Korea and sold them at a minimal profit around Britain and Europe and then I met John Fairbairn and because of our interest in Go Seigen, GoGoD was born. We started with Go Seigen’s games and finding more of his games in obscure books and magazines has always been special to us. This game, however, appears in all the collected game editions, Japan, China and Korea, but with a slight problem.

On a separate trip to Tokyo about 10 years ago, I bought about 100 Oteai bulletin magazines from my favourite bookshop there. This game was played in 1934 when the strongest players in the world played in the Oteai. We already had Go’s collected games and Kitani Minoru’s, Takagawa Kaku’s and Hashimoto Utaro’s, so we had a number of the Oteai games from that period and I settled down to work through each magazine, checking that we had each game and marking the ones I had to copy. The games were all recorded in Chinese numbers, as was the practice then. The usual format was the Division A, strongest players’ games, first and maybe some games from Division B at the back. One time, however, I found a game between Go Seigen and Miyasaka Shinji, 5dan and 6dan respectively, on one page at the back of a magazine with some text that I could not read. I checked the diagram against our copy of the game and found that there were 66 more moves on the diagram. It was obvious what had happened; in the earlier bulletin they had printed the first 3 or 4 diagrams but missed out the one with the last batch of moves and this was the apology and the complete game record.

With most other players, it would not matter much, but when they came to collect game records for the complete games, the compilers missed the apology and corrected diagram. The practice was to print the game result on the first page, but not with the number of moves, so the compiler would have seen “White wins by resignation” and it would have appeared to him that only 138 moves had been played.

John was actually visiting Japan himself when I found this and I was delighted to tell him by email. He came back to tell me that he had found another obscure game that Go Seigen had played with an amateur, so we were both having fun. I don’t know if the publishers in the Far East know that this game needs to be corrected, if a new edition is planned, but it is fun to know that there is one place where we know more than they do.

Best wishes.

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No aji, keshi, kifu or kikashi has been harmed in the compiling of this post.
http://www.gogod.co.uk

Always a delight to watch Go Seigen games! And the stronger I become (*cough*) the more I admire his moves.

It's also fascinating to hear that he was the reason to start GoGoD. When I browsed (aka read for a couple of hours) through the enormous information on players, concepts and various very interesting tidbits the other day (and not for the first time), I actually thought this is what started - so to say as a logical follow-up - the games collection.

Although I got it wrong, I'm very glad that GoGoD comes with all these "background" information. As of now I value these more than the actual games (I still got Shuei, remember? And The Go Consultans and Genan Inseki's Igo Shukairoku and the special commentary of the Meijin game and Charles Matthews' Shape Up, On your Side and Exchanges and a selection of Gateway to all Marvels and the samples of Gokyo Seimyo and Honinbo Shuho's Hoen Shinpo and I'm sure I just missed a lot...).

Thank you! =)

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go

I really like the way Go Seigen played this game. It's beautiful

I always thought the game finished with the tesuji sequence capturing the tail of the black group. But they were wrong!

I also had to go back to my archives and found some good old HD diskettes: Go Seigen 1-4, Sansa 2 Shusai 1-3, Shusaku collection, GoMaximizer II and Games of Shuho, GoGoD and GoScorer and Kitani 1000 games collection. Those were the times.

Cheers,
Vesa