I’m not saying it was the entire argument given. I’m only saying it shouldn’t be a reason for not wanting a pro organization since there will almost never be hobbyists good enough to compete against players that play Go full time. The pro organization is what give the opportunity to play Go full time so then they have a chance of competing.

Now for the subject of pro organization over teaching. Yes I think a pro organization would work better, maybe not in the short term but the long term. Teaching new players and school programs might make 5 or 10 new players at a time or in the lucky case more but if you create a pro organization the overall knowledge of Go in the west will raise. Just think of your favorite sport. Did you first learn about the sport because you went to a workshop on it or they taught it to you in school? A pro organization will allow for publicity every time one of the pros competes in a major tournament or an important game happens. It’s the difference between teaching clusters of people how to play Go, and sending a net over the entire country to just letting them know that Go exists and let them figure out the rules on their own. Even if only a small percentage of people hear about Go through the publicity it far exceeds the number of people that can be taught through workshops.

I still don't understand why there is this insistence on the AGA being required to pay them a wage...Look at the PGA (golf) or USTA/ATP/WTA/etc (tennis), the organization sets up programs, requirements for certification, organizes events, and also does overall promotion of the sport, however once certified it is up to the professional to earn their own living (either through tournament winnings, or by teaching, often with the affiliation of a club). Even in something like tennis they only estimate that ~200-300 professionals in the world actually come out a net positive just from playing in events, the rest must earn money through sponsorship, teaching, or some other source.

I personally see setting up the pathway and related events as something that can be an overall positive thing for the go community. ONce in place, if there is an entry fee for the program, or for certification I would imagine a decent portion of the cost required. The current incarnation does have the expense of a year in Korea, but is sounds like much of this is being offset either through a sponsor or the generosity of the Hangkuk Kwion. Either way, I'm not convinced the overall expense for the AGA needs to be as large as many make it out to be.

When talking about a professional organization, it alway implies the question of where the money comes from because pros by definition makes their living from the activity they are a pro at. Without adequate financing there can only be empty idealistic talks about what could happen if such and such were in place. With realism, it's the financial pillars who calls the shots of how they want to shape the organization they support.

If you look at the story of the Nihon Ki-in, you can see that there is a major patron by the name of Baron Okura Kishichiro who invested "¥100,000 in a newly built hall in Tameike, Akasaka, completed in April 1926." Back in 1926, the pre-WWII yen was frozen at USD0.50. If I read wikipedia correctly, back in 1926 each USD was still worth about 1.5g of gold. So we have a patron who is donating ¥100,000 = USD50,000 (circa 1926) = 75,000g of gold. Google says 75000 gram = 2411.30599 troy ounce. So if we use a conservative rate of USD1700 per troy ounce of gold for today's gold value, Baron Okura invested over USD4000000 (over four million dollars) in today's money.

If you apply the figure above, it's probably fair to say that you'd need to find a principal patron who is willing to invest that type of money give birth to a Western professional organization. That's the difference between the realism of what is required to make things possible; and the idealism of what people dream about and would like to see happen.

Of course, a principal patron with a stature similar to yesteryear's Baron Okura would naturally have a large voice in telling the professional organization how they should run it.

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

The conversion through gold feels like an end-around to over-inflate your figure. A more reasonable comparison would perhaps to use inflation adjusted dollars. If you compare that...50,000 1926 dollars would be the purchasing equivalent of about $615,000 in 2011. Another reasonable comparison would be to look at what the investment was -- a building, so a comparable donation today would be donating a building (which of course could have a wildly varying value depending on size and location). Admittedly donating a sizable building in a population center could end up being closer to your $4 million figure, however at least this feels like a more honest way to reach it.

The main point is that you still need a substantially wealthy patron to back a Western professional system if you want to follow the Nihon Ki-in model.

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

If a westerner really wants to be someone who makes a living from go/baduk/weiqi and doesn't have the strength to do so by winning national/international pro tournaments, there is always the option of getting a college degree from the Department of Baduk Studies at Myongji University in Korea.

"The students who major in Baduk Studies will acquire 5-dan level or above, and foreign language skills so that they can work as experts in the various fields of Baduk. The graduates can create and develop their own professional fields by utilizing the abundant resource of the Korean Baduk community. Many graduates will work in Korea as leaders, Baduk academics, Internet programmers, Baduk writers/columnists/journalists, Professional players, and managers of Baduk businesses; and some could be dispatched to foreign countries as instructors. "

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

Yes you are. Because you are doing something here called "quoting out of context". Had you quoted the full sentences I wrote, their meaning would be entirely different from how it seems here. Please don't do that again.

Now, what I argued before, and what would have been clear from full quotes, is:

I think there is no value in calling someone a professional if they cannot compete with Asian pros AND they cannot make a living playing go (i.e. cannot make it their profession). If we're going to call people who are not competitive internationally, and cannot make money doing it, professionals, then pretty much every poster on this board is a professional.

If you want to see the benefits of a pro system, then professionals in such a system need to be able to dedicate themselves to the game full-time. They need a source of income that does not take away all their time, be it prize-money, sponsorship, or just a salary paid for teaching full-time. Without that, what is professional about them?

I think somebody who earns his living partly from being a carpenter, partly by being a translator could be called both a professional carpenter and a professional translator. Or would you say that he has got no profession? Similarly a person earning his living partly from being a go-player could also be called a professional go-player. Of course a substantial part of his earnings would have to come from playing go. How much exactly is hard to tell, though...

Um, either you mean OR (not AND), or his quotes weren't out of context at all. You stated as a condition that they need to be pro strengths already.

And as I have already said,

(if this is, in fact, an argument against a pro system, and not just a semantic argument that implies that US players cannot be pros because they do not fit the definition you just pulled out of your nether regions)

The first pros from China and Korea would NOT fit your model of a pro. By your argument, they should never have created a pro system because their players were 3 stones weaker than Japanese pros.

You have to start somewhere,

1) Funding, I have heard there's a sponsor, if not, this whole argument is moot, the AGA doesn't HAVE the funds to divert from educational programs. So we really don't need to worry about poor orphans not learning the game so that a few stronger players can take trips to Uncle Hanguk's Summer Camp.

2) Level of players, the Koreans want to train US players so that those players can develop a pro system here. It's pointless if they stay in Korea because Korea doesn't have a shortage. The KBA obviously wants there to be a larger market for baduk, and beating the horse over there is counterproductive. Yes, the players will not be as strong to begin with. Just as the Chinese and Koreans took years to be viable against Japanese pros.

But those Chinese and Korean players did not "go it alone", they had training, they had a drive to create a system like this. It didn't suddenly appear when they were strong enough.

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

It's a little known fact that (AVB) is the same as ~(~A&~B).

Yeah, if you parse all the negatives, Herman's argument is actually a disjunction.

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

it's the same as saying, a person is a professional if they can compete with asian pros or they can make a living at it. (This is assuming "No Value" is actually a negation)

if that's the case, there's a lot of Go Journalists out there who now qualify as pros.

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

There are Go Journalists out there who make a living playing go?

Lets focus on this:



Where did the Korean and Chinese pro systems come from if not from the Japanese?

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

From the player base. Both Korea and China had a sufficiently large go playing population so that there was room for a pro system. They had players starting at very young ages, whose parents were willing to send them abroad at very young ages for years.

The Japanese undeniably contributed greatly to the rise of professional go in Korea and China, but I do not think it would have had much result if not for the existing fertile ground.

Pros by definition make money at what they are pros at.

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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

A lot of the back and forth point scoring here is greatly oversimplifying the issue. From reading what everyone's said, it really seems to me that there's a consensus that a pro system in the West would be good. It's a question of when, where and how. That's what people have concerns about.

With that in mind, it would be more interesting to discuss how we get there and build something that doesn't just fall over. Note the original poster wasn't just talking about Go in the US.

For better or for worse, the Go community is still small enough that there are quite a few people here who are greatly involved in their own local Go associations. We could be having a constructive discussion instead hopping onto the pointless merry-go-round of semantic arguments.

Let's stop picking up on individual sentences (which may or may not represent the spirit of what a person was really trying to say) and contructing whole arguments about them. Logically you might be right and tactically you may be unbeatable in an argument, but strategically, what exactly is being achieved apart from some light entertainment?

This isn't an either or question. You can't say that a pro system would be more effective than education or the other way round. Because it doesn't work like that. If you look at pro football, you'll see that it's supported by a whole ecosystem of fans, semi-pro leagues, local teams, social teams, junior leagues, school programs, weekend programs, parents, teachers, promoters, media, sponsors and so on. So if we want a pro system, we also need to invest in the supporting foundations underneath. So how do we get there?

For my part, I made a decision that I could do my bit by introducing Go to more players. After going to schools to teach Go to local kids for some time, I wanted a way to make those efforts work on a larger scale. The internet is the obvious answer. That's why I started thinking about doing something like Go Game Guru.

I totally agree that having access to a pro scene, as a form of entertainment, is a great way of keeping people interested in the game. That's one of the main reasons why we publish so much pro news on GGG. That sort of thing isn't going to happen immediately in the West though. We need serious plan to get there. Airtime isn't given for free, for one thing.

So tapir is right, we need more 10 kyus, because they will be the fans. Where there are fans there's money. There's media. There's exposure for the game. There's advertising. There's a way to create an economy that supports the professionals and numerous other people in related jobs. It's about educating people enough to enjoy the game, even if most people will never want to pursue it to a high level. That's what China, Japan and Korea all had already, that enabled them to make the next step.

If, as people say, the Korean Baduk Association is going to generously support the beginnings of an institution for professionals in the US, then that's a big help - an artificial leg-up with a single point of failure, but still very helpful. KBA can't make it happen on their own though, and they may not be able to sustain it for that long, because nobody knows which boat may be scuttled in the next economic storm.

But if this is really going to happen, we need to start thinking about how to best capitalise on it, so the investment and the opportunity aren't squandered. Not just the AGA, not just US Go players, not just Western Go players, but everyone who cares about the development of Go throughout the world. Pro football got to where it is now through the sustained efforts of a great number of people, over a long time. People who loved that game.

The pro Go players in the USA could just be the beginning of this.

Maybe you think the cirumstances aren't ideal right now. Maybe (like me) you still feel that this is a bit early. But if it's going to be happening anyway, then we'd better start thinking about how we can best take advantage of it as a community. Sometimes, there's never a perfect time to get started and you just have to start doing things.

Remember, we're Go players. We know that plans work out better when all our resources are working together. We're supposed to be good at thinking strategically. We're supposed to look at the whole board...

So let's think about the strategy and stop fighting a semantic half-point ko in the corner... Otherwise I'm going pull some people up for conveniently writing the greatest Go player of the 20th century out of history...


Hint for new players: He wasn't Japanese.

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David

Go Game Guru: Learn Go | How to Get Better at Go | Go Game Shop | Go Boards | Baduk TV

I was just going to say something like this myself.

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Help make L19 more organized. Make an index: https://lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=5207

The point is not whether or not someone calls himself a professional. It's up to an individual to call himself so. The point is whether a league can exist in which some people do earn a (part of their) living.

There are professional leagues in sports with people who cannot at all compete with other professionals in other leagues. I'm thinking of 2nd division football in Belgium vs. the Spanish first league but also about women tennis. Men can complain all they want but apparently there is a market for professional women who are far weaker than their male counterparts. They even get equal prize money, partly due to political correctness, partly due to the existing market of female players looking for role models and partly for male fans looking for something particular.

If the Western world wants to and is financially capable of supporting their strongest players to compose a professional league, based on the assumption that this will help generating more beginners, so as to catalyze the community and spiral it upwards, then it is irrelevant whether they can compete with Asian pros. There is of course a legal aspect, of discrimination. Indeed, the fact that Korean visitors have been collecting all the prize money in European tournaments has been perceived as discouraging for European go. But one cannot deny access based on nationality, usually.

Personally, I think that the catalysis will work best if a singular westerner competes for top titles, making for spontaneous press coverage and idolatry. It happened to Chess with Bobby Fischer, though chess was already grained in our popular culture. Such a "white raven" is hard to create. What you can do is foster the base in which such a rare animal can appear, which is what David is mainly stating.

This it seems is the crux of the issue. If the ground is not fertile, you can plant as many seeds as you want, but they will die. Is western go ground fertile? What would constitute fertile ground? Clearly this is children and their parents. It's the children and not the current amateurs who will hopefully one day become strong enough to create a surge of national pride necessary for a fan base to develop. If a western professional league built with western amateurs and Korean money gets rolling tomorrow, will we see parents of young kids invest enough time, energy, and money to make these kids eventually competitive in a fledgling league in which they may not ever earn a dime? Will national organizations be able to discover and nurture enough talent to reach a critical mass? If not, what's the point?

The amount of talent, time and devotion that it takes to get great at go is quite large. The Koreans and Chinese were probably able to achieve this mass because go was already firmly embedded in their cultures. We all know that go is a great game, but not only is it not embedded in western culture, it leads an utterly fringe existence. Will a pro league change that? Maybe we should ask the professional frisbee golf association.

I'm certainly glad that the Koreans are showing interest in promoting go in the west because it promotes a mindset sorely lacking in our attention deficient cultures - but it seems doubtful that a professional league will offer fans more than our current kibbitz filled KGS battles between Artem92 and cheater. I personally would rather see a demonstration tournament between some top Korean professionals held in the West, perhaps with some simultaneous games against the best of the West. I'm guessing that one Lee Sedol would turn more heads than an entire Western Go League.

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Patience, grasshopper.