There is a link on the SL page for Shusai which lists his games: http://homepages.cwi.nl/~aeb/go/games/g ... ai-469.sgf

I was looking at it and there are hundreds of games on the page. It got me thinking. How complete is this list? I assume it is a list of all known recorded games of Shusai. But this prompted another question.

When we see a list of games of some given professional how complete it is? Does it list only official games? Do it list teaching games with a pupil? Does it list informal games (if this exists for the individual)? This probably depends on the professional and the era. But I would be interested in the opinion of anyone who has more complete information about the topic.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

While I have no clue and so should net really be answering this, I have a hunch. I think that the answer will be - it depends on the pro and the collection. Some collections will be more complete then others, and it will be easier to find more games for some pros than for others.

Having said that, I do not believe any such collection can really be complete. Each pro is bound to play thousands of games before they even became a pro, and then probably more thousands of undocumented and informal games - with friends, at study groups or coffee shops, whenever.

Which brings me to my question - and the reason I actually opened my mouth on an issue I don't know nothing about. And the question is: Do high-level pros actually play undocumented and informal games inbetween their "formal" games? Or do they just study study study and think think think and then play a serious, formal game every few days/weeks/months? I would think that to stay in their top form they have to play a lot, which means a lot of informal games. But I really don't know, have never been a pro myself.

Anybody?

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

You would think that high level pros would play teaching games which would not be recorded in collections.

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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.

Nowadays I expect a lot of pros play (semi-)anonymously online. On Sojin 7p, a teacher at BIBA did. Kim Seungjun 9p not so much. Both played many teaching games too. Cho U tried out his weird openings online.

Hmm. I see that at least a chunk of the Shusai games in your link seems to come from GoGoD and I see no acknowledgement of that. (Some data has been stripped out but not enough to hide the source.)

But to the main point, collected games authors generally try to include every published game, which will include relay games and games against or as amateurs. However, many published games are missed and some new games turn up in previously unknown places. It is my experience that by trawling through magazines, newspapers, contacting pros direct, or just waiting for new discoveries, it is possible to add something like 50 new games per 1,000 games to a published book collection. In addition, it is possible, at an even higher rate, to add extra moves or extra data, or to make corrections (or, in some cases, simply offer variants).

We can also get a feel for how many official games are known to be missing from collections for modern players because we know the results - missing because of war, fire, forgetfulness, etc. These I would estimate at about 20 per 1,000 before the current digital era.

In the case of Shusai, GoGoD has already presented 796 games I think, but the next edition will have yet another one. I can't remember how many games were in the printed collection but I think it will have been close to 700. In the case of Go Seigen we now have 886, and I think the original printed edition we used had about 830.

The next GoGoD edition will already also have new games for Takagawa, Hashimoto (x3), Kitani and Genan (x5).

They play games all the times in study groups against each other and review with others. They're not recorded or anything. Occasionally during the TV games, players that are in the same group play each other and the commentator will mention it. In one article I was reading, a player was happy to win his game against another player who he lost a lot of games to but all unofficial games in study groups.

From what I see on Tygem and some Chinese servers, many pros nowadays train by playing online with each other (more or less like what we do on KGS). These are usually blitz games with time limit of 10 seconds or 20 seconds per move. WeiqiTV.com has special columns where pros do live steaming of their online games (and review of serious tournament games), recording while playing and explained what they were thinking and what their opponent might be attempting to do with each move (very much like what Lee Hajin does on YouTube with her Haylee's World of Go). Most famous columns belong to Meng Tailing and Ke Jie. Unfortunately Ke Jie stopped streaming his games by the end of 2014 and has only 28 games on file. Meng Tailing is still doing that and the total recorded games have now reached number 441.

Majority of Meng's games are against Korean pros, including the likes of Park Jungwhan and Byun Sangil (or rather their online accounts. There were rumors that some of the accounts are occasionally shared between pros). The games do not appear to be prearranged, as he gets challenges all the time from other pros at the end of streaming when he reviews the just finished game.

The discussions of pros playing online is interesting but when I posed the original question I was actually thinking more of historical pros. I had in mind probably those who started no later than the '60s. Sorry for not making that clear. I actually don't pay any attention to the modern pro game and could only name a handful of players who came to prominence after 1990. That would coincide with when I stopped taking the game seriously.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).