Scenarios for the future of pro go

[John Fairbairn]

There just happened to be a story in the UK today that offered a glimpse of what may become of pro go. It does not involve chess, which makes an interesting change.

The story concerned pro snooker, which is currently contesting a world championship. The parallels with go are numerous.

Pro go is nearly entirely limited to the Far East. Snooker is UK based but because of old colonial links it does have tentacles throughout the world. Of particular note is China (originally through Hong Kong). But the game also has a presence in the likes of Australia, Canada and South Africa, as well as some outposts in Europe, so "world" championship is not enmtirely a misnomer, unlike baseball's World Series (and yes, I know about The World newspaper connection).

Snooker is also like go in that matches a long tome: sometimes two days. It is televised, like go but on a similar basis - rather like watching paint dry. Pros can also do exhibition games, doing trick shots and signing sessions. Fans can attend in person but, like go, the venues are very small, you need strong buttocks and you have to keep quiet through the game. Go pros appear to have an advantage in that they can write books and give lessons. I gather that snooker pros don't normally have these options. In both go and snooker careers can be pretty lengthy,

One big difference appears to be the prevalance of betting in snooker. This seems to be a big interest factor for fans but it entangles pros and there is a current mess with ten Chinese players accused of match fixing. Go seems to have avoided this issue, not out of any moral superiority, I suspect, but simply because fans who want to gamble can play each other for money. In snooker the equipment is enormous and so play usually has to be in public halls. On the other hand, go now has a potential problem of cheating with AI.

Now down to some specifics (I am quoting a BBC story). Pro snooker has a World Tour of 130 players. The total prize money in the game is currently £11 million. Before the pandemic it was £13 million. Top players say the game needs £50 million. (Pounds can be equated to both US dollars and euros here to give a passable feel for the order of magnitude.)

It is claimed that 90% of the 130 pros can't make a living from the game. The Tour recently introduced a system of paying every pro a guaranteed £20,000 a year, and one pro estimates that most earn £30,000 a year after expenses. Which you can get (he said) from stacking shelves in a supermarket.

42 snooker pros earned £100,000 over the past two years. A very tiny percentage can make serious money but product-endorsement work in advertising seems even rarer than for go players.

I couldn't see what sort of companies provide the most money to snooker, but from seeing it on tv I think it may be the likes of insurance companies, betting companies, breweries and the like. No newspapers, and 100% male apart from a couple of referees, as far as I know.

This is all looking through a glass darkly, but I can see go having to move towards this sort of version of reality. I think chess already has, although chess seems to have had little success with tv.

[pwaldron]

I can certainly see the analogies to snooker. I am curious how many go professionals in Japan can make a living on nothing but game fees and prizes? My memory is that the prize money earnings drops off quite sharply if you're not in the top 5.

One thing that does give me hope for paying players is the world of online streaming, where content creators are paid for ad delivery to viewers. We could imagine a talented content creator putting together enough quality material to provide supplementary income. Michael Redmond seems to be embracing this to some extent with his YouTube channel, and of course other players stream on Twitch.

[xela]

Some interesting comparisons. I remember snooker being big in the 1980s, then all but disappearing...

42 snooker pros earned £100,000 over the past two years. A very tiny percentage can make serious money but product-endorsement work in advertising seems even rarer than for go players.

Before anyone says £100,000 sounds like a lot of money: I suspect this is gross income, and the amount that players get to take home after paying for travel and other expenses is only half of that.

[gowan]

I can certainly see the analogies to snooker. I am curious how many go professionals in Japan can make a living on nothing but game fees and prizes? My memory is that the prize money earnings drops off quite sharply if you're not in the top 5.

One thing that does give me hope for paying players is the world of online streaming, where content creators are paid for ad delivery to viewers. We could imagine a talented content creator putting together enough quality material to provide supplementary income. Michael Redmond seems to be embracing this to some extent with his YouTube channel, and of course other players stream on Twitch.

There are quite a lot of people providing go lessons and commentary on Youtube, besides Michael Redmond. For example, there is Baduk Doctor (Park Youngwoon, Korean 7-dan) who plays, comments and gives lessons/lectures online. He regularly defeats Chinese and Japanese pros in rapid games. Recently he won a 10 secomds per move game from Cho Chikun. There are also Go Pro (Yeonwoo Korean 1p) and some popular amateur "influencers" such as Nick Sibicky,

As for the health of the go community, how are the online go servers doing? I'm thinking not of the Asian servers but of the English language ones such as KGS and OGS. I also wonder how the in-person go clubs are faring. Attendance at in-person go clubs had been declining before the COVID pandemic due to the advantages offered by the online servers. I think the health of the amateur go world has to be strong to support a healthy pro go world. Amateurs make up the fan base for pros, after all.

[Knotwilg]

Even in a highly televised and sponsored sport like tennis, 90% of the players living the life of a professional are spending money to try and jump into the 10% where they can provide in their livelihood. The top 1% can become extremely wealthy. This isn't only because prize money grows exponentially at any step of the knockout, but also because private sponsorship is only for the ones frequently televised. So it happens that Federer and Nadal are among the wealthiest sportsmen while someone like Jan-Leonard Struff probably saved his career by reaching the quarter finals in Monte Carlo, having recently dropped to 200th place. Struff is no slouch by any measure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBNF7U_tpWE

[Javaness2]

Snooker didn't hit the big time until colour TV came along and the BBC decided to commission Pot Black. Then came the Hurricane and the Whirlwind to excite the tabloids and the public. It was then for quite a while a stable attraction, with cigarettes and alcohol paying the bills. I suppose when those got canned, things started going downhill. I wonder what axing the Top 32's safety net did to the TV figures as well - whilst being fairer in terms of competition, it was perhaps less interesting not to be able to see your old favourites on the telly, and have to cheer for new players you'd never heard of before. The complaints about money have been around for a long time now.

I suppose that Snooker is in the same class of events like Darts and Golf. Sneered at by some, enjoyed by others in their armchairs. I'd put it clearly above Chess and Go in terms of pecking order from sponsors and public awe.

Is it possible to find an inflation adjusted index of NHK total prizemoney funding to see how things are progressing? The fate of the academic Baduk course in Jeonju looks like a bad omen for Go there - but I don't expect to hear a death knell any time soon. China still finds the spare change to fund the European tour!

[Knotwilg]

Have you heard of Finn Andersen, Russel Van Duiken or Robin Kool? Neither have I but they made 240 000 dollars over the past month. The sports?
E-sports.

Stats for 2023

Total Prize Money: $31,678,590.12
Total Tournaments: 864
Total Active Players: 8266
Mean Tournament Prize Pool: $36,665.03
Mean Earnings/Player: $3,832.40
Median Tournament Prize Pool: $2,000.00
Median Earnings/Player: $700.00


https://www.esportsearnings.com/

[pwaldron]

Flipping things around, if there is a go event/player streaming something and they are able to consistently bring in eyeballs then sponsors/advertisers will follow.

I was reading John Fairbairn's Shuei book over the weekend and he noted that in the 1930's marked the entry of professional journalists into the go world, and the texture of written go material changed dramatically. I'm looking forward to seeing what professional video editors think of.

Knotwilg's point of e-spots is a good one--I've watched Starcraft streams for a number of years now and it has been a striking transition from broadcasts by enthusiastic amateurs to a much more professional events in recent years.

As I write this, I also think of televised poker. A few years ago it was everywhere, but it's dwindled some. But the essential trick to making it big was the invention of the "hole cam", which allowed viewers to see the player's cards in real time.

[gowan]

Golf is an interesting case. It is very popular among amateur players, in the US there are golf courses everywhere. Amateurs play golf partly, I believe, because it can be a social activity. Business people routinely make deals on the course, and there are opportunities for people to talk during the course of a round. The pro tour resembles pro go tournaments. Many players start a tournament but lots of them don't make the cut and don't make a lot of money. Many golf pros can't make a living from tournaments and depend on teaching at golf clubs to make a living. Makers of golf equipment sponsor tournaments and make money from amateurs by convincing them that they need more or different clubs, bags, shoes, etc. In go, how well a person plays doesn't depend on what equipment is used and it is difficult to persuade someone that they should spend a lot of money on very expensive go equipment. In fact, many go players now don't even own boards and stones, they just play online. The biggest difficulty in getting sponsorship is the small population of fans.

[pwaldron]

The biggest difficulty in getting sponsorship is the small population of fans.

This is definitely true in the west, but I think we should also be looking to Asia to see how things evolve. There's a cadre of professionals for whom go really is a livelihood, whether by winnings or teaching. If, in fact, newspapers are pulling away from go sponsorship then we have to see what comes next. Will professionals find new ways to bring go to fans (streaming, etc?) or will it all just dwindle away?

Harkening back to the days of state support for Japanese go, do we know roughly how many players were supported?

[John Fairbairn]

The big news here today is that the World Snooker Championships have been disrupted by climate change protesters. One man threw paint on a table and a woman tried to glue herself to another table.

When will go have similar protests? After all, we've had depleted clam stocks, depleted kaya forests, and plastic go stones abound.

In other climate change news here, cows are to be given special pills to save the atmosphere. The posh papers call them "methane suppressors." The yob papers call them "fart blockers." Having sat next to someone a few days ago who was farting in time to some music as he responded to a concert, I can "sense" other uses for them. If a fading memory still serves, maybe they should be de rigueur in meat-space go tournaments, too.

There was also news of a couple of pop musicians' voices being cloned by AI and a fake record being (temporarily) distributed by Apple and Spotify. Presumably a go or chess player's style can be cloned by AI, too, so that he could pass any sniff tests arbiters might try to impose?

We see more and more that AI has been a fart in the perfume factory.

[Knotwilg]

In the Flemish idiom, "much ado about nothing" is expressed as "a fart in a bottle". Maybe one day AI turns out to be just that.

[pajaro]

Go has been compared here to golf, snooker, tennis, even e-sports. TV and streaming brings money. Why? Because there are people willing to watch it, mised with some ads.

Aren't we missing a point here? The development of a go game is/can be really slow. You can watch the fourth game of the Kisei, leave the room, come back 1 hour later, and what will you have missed? I know, I know... some interesting comments, variations and blah, blah, blah. We are talking about most people here, not a few dedicated fans.

The NHK tournament has been running for a lot of time. Time limits are reasonable for the audience (maybe not for most players), people can watch a game, listen to some useful comments,... all in 1 hour (and a half? I don't know). The New Ryusei is even faster. And dramatic. None of the games played in these tournaments will be in a book ten years later. But they might attract people to the game.

[CDavis7M]

Doesn't seem like kids or parents have been mentioned uet.

But one huge difference from Snooker, and huge advantage that Go has (which has been mentioned) is that Go pros (and others) can teach. But more than that, Go is family friendly. In my local tournament I played against a 5 year old, a 6 year old, and a 70 year old (there are only a few of us in between). Some parents are willing to spend lots of money on their children and people are willing to take it. So if a clean respectable organization offers a summer Go camp teaching a quite, classic, and mentally challenging game, that is quite attractive. Why send your kid to space camp if the local Ki-in has a spot open for the same price? Plastic stones are a lot cheaper than soccer cleats.

I just don't think there's much money in pub sports. But there's always money from parents and there's always children to babysit. Of course, this isn't strictly related to pro go. But I do think accreditation is important for teaching.

[gowan]

What is happening with shogi in Japan? Is that game having the same difficulties that pro go is having?