I am compiling games from 38th Japanese Honinbo League. There's a league game between Sakata Eio and Fujisawa Hideyuki missing. I misplaced my copy of 1984 Kido yearbook so I cannot check exactly what went wrong. Can anyone help?

Gobase and http://homepages.cwi.nl/~aeb/go/games/g ... Hon38.html both have an error: the missing league game and the challenger playoff game are exactly the same, which cannot be right.

It's not in GoGoD either (can't find it, at least) maybe it was a forfait by one of them?

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

you mean this one?
http://homepages.cwi.nl/~aeb/go/games/g ... 983/28.sgf

edit: Oh, I see what you mean now. Nevermind.

In my copy of the 1984 Kido Yearbook, the record of the Honinbo League game between Sakata and Fujisawa is not given. In the cross table the game is shown as a win for Sakata. There is no mention of this game in the introduction to the tournament in the book. However, the record of 110 moves of the game between Fujisawa(Black) and Takemiya(White) was printed but the game was apparently defaulted by Fujisawa (kiken 棄権) at that point so perhaps Fujisawa forfeited the game with Sakata.

gowan, thanks for your contribution! Based on some research, here is my guess what was going on.

Fujisawa Hideyuki famously won 6 Kisei titles in a row, only to lose to Cho Chikun (4-3) in the 7th term. That was in early 1983. First it appears to me that the normal Honinbo league schedule was somewhat adjusted to make room for the Kisei title match. If you have a look at most Meijin or Honinbo league tables on Go4Go, you can see that they are arranged in such a way that each player roughly plays one game every month. Japanese are incredibly accurate people and they don't often change these well organised schedules. But you can see during the 38th Honinbo League, Fujisawa's 6 games were played over the last 3 months on 1982. So his schedule was busier than normal.

Another big event was Fujisawa's diagnosis of stomach cancer around that time. The accurate time was difficult to find out (this is again a culture issue - unlike many western celebrities who openly talk about their diseases, it is quite usual for Asian people to do that), but several references say clearly it was during the 7th Kisei title match. It was clear that Fujisawa at some point went through a big surgery. So it is quite sensible to assume that he gave up some less important games.

There is no need for any mystery. Kido YB states quite clearly what happened: "In League Game 28 (Sakata Eio vs Fujisawa Hideyuki" Sakata won by default."

T Mark and I once had a discussion about games like this. They count in the record, not just for tournament placings but for handicaps and promotions. If you are trying, for example, to make sense of a series of games at B-B-W handicap and the database has no record of a defaulted game, it becomes impossible to trace the series properly.

I therefore proposed putting the defaulted games in the database with just header information. Mark demurred. His reasoning was that people would write to him to complain that they were buying empty games and he would be the one to have to deal with all the correspondence. He was right in that regard. It's unbelievable how many people wrote in to complain about things like including handicap games, including games with amateurs, even when they played pros or were to become pros in future. We even had people demanding money back because there were, say, five amateur games in a collection of 10,000.

In addition, in those days I maintained a huge database of results and reports from over 300 tournaments which was distributed with GoGoD. We therefore had another vehicle to record the missing games. It's too much work to continue it now (though I still have my own uses for it), so one day I may go back and include the missing items in the games database on a header-only basis.

Really? That seems like a prize winner for grump of the year.

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I've met something worse. A guy bought my database, downloaded it and immediately disputed the payment. It was not about money, but the hassle to handle the dispute with Paypal.

Funny. I was just adding some Honinbo games, noticed this duplication, asked Google, and lo! you and JF already posed and answered the question two weeks ago.