Who is Gu Zihao? He's shooting up the rankings.

12 구쯔하오 辜梓豪 辜梓豪 Gu Zihao

Was born 3/13/1998

2015 - Won Leemin cup
2016 - reached round of 8 Chunlan cup

Games Gu played.

http://www.go4go.net/go/games/byplayer/1253

Iyama Yuta is the only Japanese pro in this rank of top 100 pro?

I think YOB = 1998, making him a little bit younger than Ke Jie?
http://baike.baidu.com/subview/9267906/9299808.htm
All Japanese sites seem to have 3/13 as the birthday, e.g. https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%BE%9C%E6%A2%93%E8%B1%AA

_________________
Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

YOB=1998 is correct.

There seems to be an endless supply of these strong young Chinese pros! Below are his games from the 11th Chunlan first 2 rounds: wins against Xu Haohong 3d of Taiwan and Kono Rin 9d of Japan. As Kono showed in the Ing cup he can beat top 20 players so that's a decent win, but Gu's next game in the Chunlan is against Kim Jiseok 9d so that'll be a good test of if he can really fight with the big boys.

Iyama at 17th makes complete sense. I've been saying it for a long time that there is no way Iyama could crack top 10. Even top 15 would be a stretch for him. It matters little if Iyama holds all seven major domestic titles when his competition is so weak: no other Japanese player is even ranked in the top 100!

Iyama is the biggest koi in the koi pond, but there is a wide open ocean out teeming with sharks.

Finally, there's a ranking that makes common sense, unlike the one from Goratings.org!

It's a shame that Japan doesn't open her tournaments to foreign players. Some fresh blood and better competition can really help the ossified Japanese Go scene. The Chinese City League system is a great model to emulate: better competition raises all boats.

While I do agree that Iyama shouldn't be in the top 10, I would argue that based on the (sparse) encounters he's had with Korean and Chinese players he probably should be.
The reason he can't crack into the top 10 is because he almost exclusively plays players that are a lot weaker in the ranking. So that he gets very few points for a win and loses a lot for each loss.

Hmm, it seemed that Iyama's rating was inflated precisely due to the fact that the rating system believes that only a player with rating as high as those of players in the top X of the table would possibly be able to maintain such a high winning percentage against the other Japanese players, which may not necessarily be true (elo's winning probability curve probsbly doesn't necessarily have to reflect reality for it to be fairly usable, etc).

_________________
On Go proverbs:
"A fine Gotation is a diamond in the hand of a dan of wit and a pebble in the hand of a kyu" —Joseph Raux misquoted.