I think that if we are arguing who the best player is based on number of important wins and total wins, then maybe Iyama would come out on top. It is important to remember that Iyama only has to defend many of his titles, and doesn't have to beat every other Japanese player in the league or tournament that makes him the challenger for a title. But in international tournaments, the previous winner has to fight his way back to the finals, making any sort of continuous victories in the same tournament day more impressive than Iyama's victories. It takes more skill for pros to beat a continually changing group of people year after year than it does for Iyama to beat the same ten people who play him in domestic title matches and continually lose to him.
I'm not saying that Iyama's victories aren't impressive and that he isn't a strong player, I'm merely saying that his wins are just against people he's shown he's better than and do less to salvage Japan's reputation on the international scene than the wins of other players do for their own country and records.

I would agree that these are meaningful distinctions. Dr. Bae's ranking tries to approximate something closer to the former. I believe that his ranking considers results from the past three years with older results being weighted less.

My own view of the differences falls roughly (very roughly!!) along the following lines.

1. Who had the best skill in 2013: Who, if he played every player exactly 10000 times under identical conditions, would have the highest winning percentage?
2. Who performed the best cumulatively in 2013: Who, in the games he actually played, had the highest number of "quality-adjusted" (based on strength of opponents) wins?
3. Who performed the best on average in 2013: Who, in the games he actually played, had the highest number of "quality-adjusted" (based on strength of opponents) wins divided by the number of games he played.

It is difficult for me (and many others) to rank Iyama higher than 10th under any of those definitions.

Now, if we asked who had the best financial performance in 2013, the answer would be Mr. Iyama Yuta for sure.

Check the latest Bailing Cup schedule

viewtopic.php?f=13&t=9960

Can you guess who is not there?

I would argue that the best player is not necessarily the one who wins the most tournaments or the most money. All these rating systems are flawed and unreliable, especially in attempting to compare members of groups that do not play each other very much. In any case I think the best player is the one with the deepest understanding of the game. There seems to be wide acceptance of the statement that Go Seigen was the best player in the world from approximately the late 1930's to the 1950's or thereabouts. But how many tournaments did he win? Winning a long match is different from winning a tournament. Go Seigen made many innovations in joseki, opening theory, etc. Winning a tournament requires freedom from blunders but great creativity seems to me to be accompanied by frequency of blunders, consider a great player like Fujisawa Hideyuki.

Great creativity is one thing, certainly worthy of admiration, but if you blunder regularly how can you be considered the best player in the world?

My understanding of his game was that he was considered the best at the opening, or the first 50 or so moves, and that his blunders tended to be endgame mistakes. I'm not sure how closely you can relate the two, apart from that a lot of effort in the opening may result in fatigue taking its toll in the endgame sometimes.

Yup, travel conflict with the Kisei (he'll be playing the second day of the Kisei the night before he'd have to compete in China). A few years ago, there was talk of adjusting Japanese schedules to accommodate more international competition. I wonder if the initiative died, or if Iyama simply doesn't care to push it.

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Occupy Babel!

Go Seigen dominated every top player of his day in the most serious of matches. Also, it is tough to fault someone for not winning tournaments in an era when tournaments were rare. The Meijin tournament began in the 60s and Go Seigen was not the same after his car accident in 1960. The Honinbo Tournament began earlier but my memory is that he did not participate in more than a handful of those because of conflicts with the Nihon Ki-in.
And he beat the snot out of every top player of his day in matches that were matters of honor. Sometimes to the point that they became obsessed with him.
Fujisawa won a lot of tournaments. The lasting image of him is that he was the best when he cared. The Kisei title was like THE de facto world championship during his era. To put it in contemporary terms, it was like an international tournament that attracted every top 40 player in the world with a $2,000,000 prize for the winner. Now suppose that someone won this tournament several years in a row at age 40. On top of that, suppose that this player would drink, smoke, gamble, and party most of the year and quit those vices cold turkey one month before the tournament so that he could prepare. That person would get many votes for being the best in the world.

This was essentially Shuko during his run of six Kisei titles, which began when he was 51 years old. He was no longer considered the best after that ended, which was followed by the Kobayashi-Cho era. Of course, many people still believed that he had the best understanding of go, but that is different from being the best at playing go.