Whenever the professional chessplayers try to find their new champ - as right now - I aks myself: Why isn't Go able to create a tournament to find the best player in the world? Isn't that easy? Isn't there a big company that would be willing to promote the world's most complex game? I was never in Asia, so to those of you with better inside: Is there a reason for all those many tournaments and not one ultimative one or are they just sleeping in Asialand concerning the marketing possibilities such an event could have?

Insufficiently large egos. Go needs a Kirsan Ilyumzhinov to make things more interesting...

Since when did a world championship determine the world's best player?

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

What do you mean? There are multiple world championship tourneys.

Ed, perhaps he means a metachampionship.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

DrStraw, perhaps. Isn't there an upcoming (or on-going?) 10-game match between GuLi and LeeSedol ?

I mean a world championship like chess had from 1900-1990. Instead we have several main tournaments in Go and nobody knows who's the real "King Kong Go".

Do you mean unlike what they have now?

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

The main problems is that unlike chess there isn't a precise international rating system that all countries follow for organizing tournaments. Back when the first two international events started in 1988 -- the Fujitsu Cup and Ing Cup -- the results were widely reported as "So-and-so has won the Go World Championship so can now be declared the World Champion." But as more international events popped up and more winners appeared this way of talking went away. There was a short time when we had world championships and champions, but the terms became vacuous and were put into disuse.

Other issues exist, but they again stem from the lack of a precise international rating system. For example, one problem is the sponsorship of the event. Some sponsors fill the field with the majority of their countrymen, making the results questionable. This way of inviting happens when there's a lack of international standards to objectively say who should and shouldn't be invited. Therefore, the organizers ultimately choose whoever they want.

A more interesting question is: Why has such a international rating system not been established? That gets into politics, nature of go and regional tensions.

In Chess - before 1995 - there was a playoff-tournament and the winner could challenge the world champion. So let's play around: Every Go organisation will send 2 of its best players to a tournament and the two best will play out a championship later. The bait is 5 Mio. $ for the winner, 500K for the second and 10K for every participant, sponsored all by Microsoft. I think every good go player or professional would take that chance. Such an event would raise worldwide attention for Go and Microsoft, because Go is superior to any other board game. If planned properly everybody could win: the board game and the firm sponsoring it and I wonder why nobody ever came to this idea.

You can always just view it similar to tennis. There are a bunch of opens and you figure out who did best in the international tournaments if you want to pick one. Honestly, I've never cared whether there was a system to pick a number 1. All the top players are very close.

Anand has been world chess champion since 2007, but Carlsen and Topolov have topped the rating list more than him since then.

Go has various World Amateur Championships because of the IGF. There is no such body for the multiple professional associations, therefore there is no World Championship. I don't believe that the rating list has the same status as the title of World Champion.

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North Lecale

Nothing against sponsorship, but I fail to understand what benefit exclusively associating with a single commercial enterprise (with frequent malpractices) would bring to Go.

Really? I don't follow chess much but my impression was that Carlsen was usually regarded as the strongest player of the last few years.

That might be more down to the fact that FIDE broke the world championship. Somebody like Botvinnik was not the strongest player in tournaments, but he still had a higher status in history due to his multiple titles. In the present moment, people point at numbers, but over time I do not believe that the number is regarded as the same achievement as a title.

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North Lecale

I think Carlsen is definitely regarded as the strongest player, and this chess fans therefore expected that he would be able to challenge Anand. A few years ago, there were obstacles (I think he said he wouldn't participate in the candidates tournament), and it was widely regarded as a bad thing for chess--not a disaster, but not the way things should go.

I'd like a similar world championship for Go, but obviously there are functional sports such as tennis with no similar system.

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Occupy Babel!

While the casual consumer of Go trivia may not appreciate them, I think there are substantial differences between the counting systems, timing systems and tournament formats, that just don't exist in Chess. IE you don't have ten games at eight hours apiece on one end and one game two hour sudden death matches on the other in Chess. It's more like saying let's see who the worlds fastest runner is.

Chess has its own extremes.
Considering that chess game is, on average, 30-40 moves long, these extremes are quite different from Go extremes.

For example - you don't really have 5-min-sudden-death in Go, do you?
At least - nobody sane does. In chess, this is not uncommon.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

I think the comparison to tennis is interesting, because tennis is probably the most popular single-player sport in the world. Maybe it makes sense to look to pro tennis as a model for international competition.