Does anyone know where I can find go playing statistics by country? i.e. number of active players and maybe even by age (kids vs adults). I've google a bunch and haven't found anything. thanks.

I think age information will be impossible to find because of all the privacy protection rules. For player "population" in Europe see the European Go Database at http://www.europeangodatabase.eu/EGD/Stats_Country.php.

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Bear in mind that's the population of tournament players. People who play go but who have never gone to an EGF sanctioned tournament won't be counted. It wouldn't be hard to play go now and then on servers and be completely unaware of a tournament scene existing in your country, or even just clubs existing in countries where the clubs are very small (10 or less turning up) and widely scattered.

thanks, I should have been more precise -- what I'm really interested in is estimates of the number of players overall (even those who just play at home with friends) in Asian countries.

I think the only way to find that information would be to discover or conduct a large sample sized survey for each country you are interested in. It is conceivable that some of the Pro Organizations have conducted such surveys in an attempt to increase sponsorship, but it is unlikely that you would be able to gain access to that information. Maybe a better course is to find people who have lived in said countries and ask about their perceptions of the popularity of go. If you can get several respondents, each estimating the percentage of people they know who play go, you could make some reasonable inferences.

This is 15 years old, but about the most detailed info I've ever encountered:

https://web.archive.org/web/20000510150 ... census.htm

It claims some 27 million worldwide, with over 22 million of them in Asia.

The definition they use for "go player" is unclear, but seems to be rather inclusive. E.g they claim 46,000 go players in Germany, while the EGD lists 5,567 German players that have played at least one tournament in the past 20 years. So that would mean there are 8 German players that do not visit tournaments for every one that does. This is not per definition an unreasonable claim, but it probably means you have to count as "go players" everyone who knows how to play, no matter how active they are currently playing.

Other sources also list tens of million of players. E.g. the IGF claims about 40 million players on their site, while the BGA says there are 60 million worldwide. Again, much of it hinges on your definition of "go player".

Interesting. Doing some basic math,and using google translate, I get from a high of 20% in Korea to 2% and below for other asian countries, and much lower in the rest of the world.

It's interesting to compare to chess, which appears to be much larger. I'm not sure how reliable this is -- http://en.chessbase.com/post/che-redux- ... -play-che- -- but just Russia with 50M chess players and 43% have played in the last year.

However, a quick google show's mahjong seems to crush them both -- http://www.sloperama.com/mjfaq/mjfaq23.html

Of course, none of these numbers seem very reliable...