A very peaceful game, and already in yose by move 120.

According to katago, Sumire has a small advantage up to move 127 (at move 126, b+5.2 and 77% wr). 127 lose her 27%wr and 5pts compared to L11, and after 133, she is estimated at 15% wr and -5pts

Sumire has just won the Japanese 2019 Journalists' Prize. Surprise, surprise.

The citation mentions not just her own performance (13 wins four months after being the youngest pro ever) but also the boost she gave to the spread of go.

Previous winners of the prize are: Sakai Hideyuki, Cho U, Zen, Go Jump (for Hikaru no Go), Masamitsu Junji (the guy who crowdfunded the 13x13 tournament), Ishikura Noboru, AlphaGo, Iyama Yuta, and Mannami Nao. Sumire is in distinguished company already!

Sumire won her 3rd round match vs Takatsu Masaaki 1p on Dec 19 in Kisei prelims. She plays Iwamaru Hei 6p in the 4th round. She needs two more wins to make it to Kisei league C next year. The C league is very competitive - only 2 female players played in C league this year (Xie Yimmin and Ueno Asami).

One of the two amateurs lost (the other hasn't played its 3rd round game). Ueno Asami has won her 3rd round game, too. Sumire is one of 5 female players that won their 3rd round games in Kisei prelims.

Here is a summary of Sumire's 2019 participation in Japanese tournaments using data from https://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/. She is still active in tournaments with black name. She is out or did not participate in tournaments with red names:

• Kisei: Won 3 games in a row in West Block, frame 5. Last win was on Dec 19th. Plays Iwamaru Hei 6p next. Bracket: https://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/match/kisei/045.html.
  [Update]: She lost her game against Iwamaru Wei on Jan 23, 2020.
• Meijin: Won her 1st game in Pre-selection C vs Yamada Kazuo 7p (might be Yamada Wakio 2671 on goratings.org) on 12/26. Bracket: Kansai/Chubu, Frame 4 of https://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/match/meijin/046.html. Will play Naoyoshi Furuta 4p next.
• Honimbo: Won 3 games in a row in Qualifying B/C vs Yamamoto Kentaro 5p, Masahiro Takabayashi 7p and (Yoichi Yoda 7p or Shunta Utani 2p). Can't tell which was the 3rd opponent, because of the stupid nicknames on the Nihon Ki-in web site. She plays Hane Yasumasa 9p next in the final of her Qualifying B frame. See the Kansai/Chubu section, frame 9 of https://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/match/honinbo/076.html. If she wins that game, then she will play in another round of qualifying (they call that one "Qualifying A" ). There you have to win 2 or 3 games to get to the "Final qualifying". And if you win that, you make it to the Honimbo league. Pretty elaborate! (Understandable since they have more than 100 professional players).
  [Update]: She lost her game vs Hane Yasumasa on Jan 16, 2020.
• Oza: Did not participate. The drawing date for qualifying B/C was on Feb 15, 2019, so she was not eligible this year.
• Tengen: Did not participate. The lottery date was Mar 13, 2019.
• Gosei: She will play against Hiromasa Yanagawa 7p in frame 7 of Kansai/Chubu section in 1st game of Pre-selection C. See https://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/match/gosei/046.html.
• Judan (nicknamed "10-dan"): Sumire won 3 games in frame 7 of Kansai/Chubu, but lost the 4th game vs Komatsu Taiki 3p on Dec 12th. See https://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/match/jyudan/059.html
• Agon-Kiriyama Cup - Did not participate. Preliminaries started in Feb. The tournament allows amateurs, but there were probably too many things going on back then preparing for Pro admission.
• King of New Stars/Shinjin-O - Sumire lost the final preliminary game on Dec 16th against Nyu Eiko 2p. Main bracket: https://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/match/shinjin/045.html.
  Sumire will be playing Yamada Kazuo 7p in the Meijin preliminaries soon https://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/match/meijin/046.html. She's in Kansai/Chubu, frame 4 bracket.
• Okan (Crown): Did not participate
• NHK: Did not participate. Don't know how you get in, I can't see any preliminaries
• Ryusei: Lost on April 22nd her 1st round game vs Omori Ran 1p. Frame 8 of Nihon Ki-in Kansai office section https://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/match/ryusei/029.html.
• Masters Cup: You have to be over 50 years old and have at least 7 major titles to participate.
• Aluminum Cup (nicknamed "Young Fight"). Won 1 game but lost the 2nd on Sept 23 against the eventual winner of her bracket, Miyamoto Chiharu 1p. The winner had to play 3 games in the same day!.
• SGW Cup Nakajima - Did not participate
• Women's Honimbo: lost her 1st round qualification game on Nov 4th against Akiko Tsukuda 5p.
• Women's Tachioi Cup: won on Oct 3rd and Nov 21st. Plays Wang Yi Yi 3p next. See West block, frame 3 of https://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/match/aidu/007.html. [Update] She lost her game vs Wang Yi on Jan 30, 2020.
• Women's Meijin: Did not participate. The drawing date was July 27, 2018 so she wasn't eligible.
• Women's Kisei - won 2 games in qualification, but lost in main bracket on Sep 3th against Mannami Mao 3p. (Mannami Mao eventually made it to the semifinals).
• Women's Saikyo: Won her 1st preliminary game on Dec 23rd against Takatomi Kayami 3p. Plays Ayako Ono 1p next. Bracket: West 2, Frame 3 of https://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/match/senko/005.html.
• Women's Hakata/Kamachi Cup: Will play her 1st round vs Chiharu Miyamoto 1p. See West, Frame 1: https://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/match/kamachi/001.html.
  [Update]: She lost her game vs Chiharu Miyamoto on Jan 13, 2020.
• Wakatake Cup: Lost 1st round match vs Kikkawa Hajime 3p.
  [Update]: The actual opponent in Watake Cup was Kikkawa Hajime, according to John Fairbairn.

Edits:
[Dec 28, 2019] She won her game in Meijin preliminary on Dec 26th, 2019.
[Jan 18, 2020] She lost her game in Hakata/Kamachi preliminary on Jan 13, 2020.
She lost her game in Honimbo preliminary on Jan 18th, 2020.
[Jan 24, 2020] She lost her game in Kisei prelims vs Iwamaru Wei on Jan 23, 2020.
[Jan 31, 2020] She lost her game vs Wang Yi 3p in Women's Tachoi Cup.

Sumire ended the year up to 27 December 2019 with a score of 24-7, which placed her in 11th position for winning ratio of all pros who had played at least 24 games (and top female; Ichiriki Ryo was top with 47-14).

Other female stars glittered, too. Ueno Asami was third in the traditionally favoured list of number of wins (favoured because it reflects the difficulty of winning through in the many knockout tournaments). She had a 44-25 tally (Shibano Toramaru was top with 52-18) and Fujisawa Rina was joint 4th with 38 wins. That included a 12-win streak, BTW, 5th highest in the year (Ichiriki top on 16). Xie Yimin was 12th with 31-23 and Suzuki Ayumi joint 15th with 29-15. Kato Chie was joint 19th on 27-18.

These figures include women's, young players' and seniors' tournament. But for the women it's a situation they have created for themselves and so is all the more commendable.



This is a mistake: her opponent was Kikkawa Hajime 3-dan, who went on to be runner-up in this Young Bamboos Cup, which is a restricted event for players under 40 in the Nihon Ki-in Osaka branch.

I know it doesn't matter much but how is 47-14 a better win ratio than 24-7?

My mistake. Sumire was 17-7. I added the two figures while I was working out whether I had all 24 games and that obviously stuck. She was on 70.83%.

I'm not a numbers person and haven't got a built-in alarm that makes me check whether numbers make sense

But clearly good enough first year to quash any complaints about her promotion to pro not being justified,

Thank you for the correction. I updated the original post with the correct information.

Alas, Sumire lost her first two games of 2020, so she is out of Honimbo and Hakata/Kamachi cup.

It is worth mentioning that the game lost in Honinbo preliminaries was against the legendary Hane Yasumasa 9p.

She fell behind in the first fight in the upper-right, then got even worse (hopeless by Leela's analysis) in the second fight in the upper-left. I wonder if that is because she thought she needed to take risks after falling behind in the upper-right, or was just a mistake).

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Sumire, as usual, played quite a bot-style opening, getting to the points bots typically like:
- q6 as the follow up to an ignored low pincer, and then q5 as the follow up of that
- d5 press
- d7 pushing, however my weak phone bot didn't like it at this timing, preferring to directly q5. And once you have decided to push and white extend them should push once more at d9.
- p17 kick, bot wants d9 then here.
- M18 invade an AG and LZ move. As above d9 first.
- but Hane then deviates from the standard bot sequences, which I presume Sumire knows, with some minor mistakes and she makes some bigger mistakes in return in the unfamiliar variations. Experience beat youthful new ideas this time. This kind of outcome is why some people say "don't copy bot moves you don't understand, because if opponent answers differently and you don't know the continuation you mess up". But I don't agree with that. First of all trying new ideas is a good way to learn and grow as a player, plus it is interesting and fun and winning is not so important for an amateur. And even for a pro where winning is your job some short-term loses are probably worth the long-term gain of developing as a player. I'm sure Sumire will study her mistakes here and improve.
- but having said that the p13 cut was suspicious, did she not see the net / loose ladder? That's quite a bad mistake for a pro. Of course when White blocked at r13 without the ladder it's natural to want to cut, but as your opponent is a human he surely knows the ladder doesn't work so you either think he's being stupid or respect his skill and should check for his plan to counter the cut. Maybe she thought he would cut at r16 rather than directly descend at s13 in sente in which case it's natural for black to answer at s14 which takes a liberty so prevents the loose ladder from working, but if she saw that then she could also answer s13 in game at s14 to break it.

Seen today on goratings.org:

Any chance of organising a match between these two? :-)

I disagree, as well. One thing I have been doing lately is going over New Fuseki games with the Elf commentary. It has changed my view of it. OC, it was not too long before the pros stopped playing it, but did not entirely repudiate its ideas. Elf, however, takes a dim view of it. I wonder now if Kitani and Go Seigen would have been so successful with it if they had not been so damn good. According to Elf, they did not understand it so well themselves. Everybody was feeling their way, they were just better than nearly everybody else at navigating unfamiliar territory. Because of it breadth and depth, there will always be an aspect of go of jumping into the river to learn how to swim.

You have much more experience with bot play than I do, but if Rina was adopting it, I was surprised by the early pincer. I would have expected the press against the White stone in the bottom left corner, followed in the bottom right by the 4th line kosumi or keima.

I also have a different impression about Q-06. It seems to me that Hane did not ignore the pincer, but dropped back to the 19th century to play the three space counterpincer. He may have done so in part to take Rina out of familiar territory. My impression also is that the main bot response to the counterpincer is the kick at R-04 followed by the one space extension on the 3d line, not Q-06, which is indeed the play after a tenuki. (Waltheri shows a few games for the counterpincer after the advent of AlphaGo; they feature the kick plus extension.)

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Well, according to the Elf team (private communication), Elf did not understand it so well either - it was trained on 7.5 komi.

My take on the fundamental point about understanding bot play is that you have to first declare which brain you are using.

If you want to be a typical amateur and not put the hours in, and so use your conscious brain in an attempt to "understand" "theory," you are likely to be wasting your time, or at least using it inefficiently. Seems then that the best choice is just to follow your own preferences and have fun.

What pros like Shibano Toramiru do is train their unconscious brain. Shibano doesn't even use AI himself. He simply spends all his rest days playing on the internet and so has absorbed enough "understanding" of AI play that way to write a fantastic year-long series on the "Fuseki Revolution" created by AI, and to win the Meijin and Oza. He also claimed to have fun doing it. But he says he's a テキトー　kind of kind anyway.

Sumire lost another game in Women's Tachioi cup vs Wang Yi on Jan 30, 2020. As far as I can tell, she lost all 4 games played in 2020.

No- she won her Globis Cup game on 27th Jan., but this was her first win this year. And she'll be eligible for that for almost 10 more years!

She seems very fond of a Union-Jack bedecked coverlet at the moment. A Brexit supporter?

She has just won the 2019 Kansai Area New Power Prize, which means she is flying the flag also for go. Competition there is with the likes of baseball pitchers and figure skaters, and it's reasonably high profile.

Sumire has resumed winning ways in 2020 and now has two wins, the latest I've seen being on 3 February when she defeated Yanagawa Hiromasa 7-dan in the Gosei prelims.

Last year, by my reckoning, Sumire scored 17-7 in games that count towards promotion, so she now has 19 of the 30 wins she needs to become 2-dan.

Her official record last year was by far the best in percentage terms of the main contenders of the 27 1-dans in the Nihon Ki-in, and in terms of actual number of wins only three players, who have been around much longer, exceeded her total. For comparison, Antti Törmänen scored 5-11, which I think is also rather good.

Yanagawa, though much higher up in the dan echelon, scored 9-10, so is hardly one of the patzer has-beens some of Sumire's earlier opponents have been accused of being. But like the others he seemed shell-shocked after the game and predicted more than a bright future for the little girl.

A couple of revealing comments about her were vouchsafed. One is that she is just the usual cute little girl away from the board, but as soon as the game begins she locks into her serious game-face and remains fully focused. She does not even pay any attention to the inevitable press guys hovering around.

Another, as regards her style, is that she is apparently very good at shape. It has also been noted that she is fond of fighting, but delays it until late in the game. Here is an example that was given.



Seemingly, a crude fighting type of player would be expected to play A now as White. Sumire played the slower B. That was a very plausible move according to LeelaZero, although LZ preferred C (and did not even look at A). Sumire has shown in previous games an ability to think like the bots. She obviously hasn't quite mastered it, but her losses seem to me to be because she is prone to be too optimistic about her fighting ability. She has yet to learn some big groups do die. But more remarkable than her tactics is her apparent ability to avoid collateral damage during very complex fighting. My reading is that is what is meant by her being good at shape. She sets up thick positions for herself first before fighting, and can spot weaknesses in the opponent's shapes early enough to know where to plan to fight. It seems to be a style highly dependent on intuition, and to have intuition so good so young must be what made her stand out, I believe.

Here are her current tournaments using data from https://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/. She is still active in tournaments with black name:

• Meijin: Won her 1st game in Pre-selection C vs Yamada Wakio 7p (2671 rating on goratings.org) on 12/26. Won the final of the Preliminary C against Furuta Naoyoshi 4p on Feb 10, 2020. Will play Horimoto Mitsunari next. Bracket: Kansai/Chubu, Frame 4 of https://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/match/meijin/046.html.
  
• Agon-Kiriyama Cup Lost the 1st game in preliminaries against Sakaguchi Takayama on Feb 24. There seem to be about 8 amateurs as well. Kansai frame 3 bracket: https://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/match/kiriyama/027.html
  
• Gosei: Won 1st game vs Yanagawa Hiromasa 7p in Prelim C. Her next opponent will be Wataru Muramoto or Sano Takahata. See frame 7 of Kansai/Chubu section in https://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/match/gosei/046.html.
  
• Women's Senko(Saikyo): Won her 1st preliminary game on Dec 23rd, 2019 against Takatomi Kayami 3p. Won against Ayako Ono 1p on Feb 10, 2020. Her next opponent is undecided. Bracket: West 2, Frame 3 of https://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/match/senko/005.html.

It seems February was a better month for her. She's got 2 wins as far as I can tell.

Edits:
[Feb 16, 2020] Corrected some player & tournament names using information from John Fairbairn.
[Feb 29, 2020] Updated Agon-Kiriyama results with her loss to Sakaguchi Takayama.

This seems to suggest it did a good job with the others. It didn't.

Yamada Kazuo -> Yamada Wakio

Naoyoshi Furuta -> Furuta Naoyoshi

Sakaguchi Takayama -> Sakaguchi Ryuzo

Takatomi Kayami -> Tafu Kae

Horimoto-something -> Horimoto Mitsunari

Ayako Ono -> Ono Ayako

I would also suggest referring to the Women's Saikyo as the Senko Cup, to avoid confusion with an earlier event of that name.

Thank you for the corrections. I can't read their characters, so it's hard for me to determine whether the auto-translation is correct.