For fans of Japanese go, welcome news that one barrier to young players has been removed. From Term 37 the Gosei will be open even to Nihon Ki-in pros of 4-dan and below. The Kansai Ki-in abolished this old restriction some time ago.

The other tournaments are not so biased against youngsters after reforms a few years ago, but it is still not a level playing field.

Thank you, but are there any other tournaments left with serious restrictions against youngsters? (I mean after they play their way up through the preliminaries once, they will start in higher stages from then on as well.)

Yes, this is the basis and the intent of the reforms, but I believe there is still some lag in the system from the old days. Fail one year and you have to wait a whole year in each event. Of course, repeated failure is likely to indicate you are not going to cut a swathe through the upper echelons, but if there's a crop of young pros having to start out by playing mainly each other, they may end up on the A beats B, B beats C, C beats A merry-go-round instead of going up the helter-skelter. The Korean system seems more often to pitch young players in at the deep end at once. The Chinese system seems somewhere in-between to me, but this is just an impression. I haven't actually studied it.

One other constraint (although this is changing) is that in some international events players for Japan can be selected. Obviously the title holders and so on get first dibs. But Korea and China have moved over to qualification events for international places, and in theory a 1-dan can win a place.

I'm afraid I don't understand what you're talking here regarding the "restrictions for youngsters" and the "barrier to young players". If you're 60 y.o. and 3 dan are you a youngster? And ... if you're let's say 25 y.o. and you're 5 dan then you're not a young player but an old one? I think that the point of the 4 dan (or whatever) restriction was another one ...

The Japanese are continuing their hand-wringing about catching up with the Chinese and Koreans, whose young players have taken over the go world. Japan would like to have a few young players of its own able to compete with them. Over the past five or six years there have been various steps taken to aid this process.

Not all are reforms of existing tournaments, but where that happens, of course older pros are affected, too - but nobody cares about them. Other steps include some new events (e.g. Young Carp, Nakano Cup), and there have also been quite a few visits organised for young players abroad (mainly to China).

If there is only one edition per year this is likely the case. Anywhere.

If I look at the tables of the preliminaries, it looks to me like that there are quite a lot of 5 dan up until 9 dan professionals who have to start in the C preliminaries (due to bad success in earlier years) as well. While players like Suzuki Shinji et al. likely never see the C preliminaries again. And I don't really see what is bad about it. It gives the other players an opportunity to grow in a less harsh environment before being cut apart by the top 20 (ok, you may object they don't get enough games if they are not winning). And it gives the players which are slowly going down already some time to soften the impact.

It's not the same "anywhere". In Japan you have almost twice as many players as in either China or Korea, so there is an extra step in each knockout. Also, almost all Japanese events are knockouts, so a knockout failure has a major impact. In China and Korea young players play in the leagues and can play week after week even if they fail some weeks. In the leagues alone they can play more games than a young Japanese gets to play all year.

Don't take offence, but I won't be answering anything else in this thread. The only point that interested me was that the Japanese are trying to match the young players of China and Korea. For me it was just a news point, not a debating point, though I'll happily read discussion by others.

Edit: Although I said I was not answering any more, I did just see a ranking list of Nihon Ki-in players, and it does seem worth adding this to point up the scope of the problem. Despite the various reforms, of the top 32 players only one is under 20 (Shida) and only four others are under 30 (29, 29, 26 and 21). The average age of the top 32 is 38. I don't have the figures for China and Korea to hand, but they are certain to be a good deal younger.

I don't have it in front of me, but awhile back I tallied up the Chinese and Korean numbers (based on the Chinese and Korean ratings, not the win lists that I believe John is referring to). I think the average ages were somewhere around 23 or 25, with plenty of teenagers. I have it written down somewhere--maybe I can dig it up.

One niggling detail, John. Shida is 20 as of December 6th, and doesn't Murakawa Daisuke turn 20 on December 14th?

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Occupy Babel!

I really should (and will now) keep to what I say. The list obviously refers to activity before 6 December and I don't keep birthdays in my head (my children routinely make rude remarks because I can't remember theirs either). And I specifically said the list was for Nihon Ki-in players.

China uses a point system created by Ma Xiaochun 9p to select the seed players. Basically, one gains points by reaching various stages of a tournament. After accumulating enough points, one gets a seeded spot in the tournament and the points are cleared. Therefore top performers (like Kong Jie 9p lately) have enough points to participate all major tournaments without going through qualification events.