I've been reading some Japanese Go history, of late. Sometimes, a rereading of Shuei's life, sometimes I would advance some on Segoe's biography... you know the drill. And I keep having a bit of the same feeling time and again.

If we assume that pros, in the old system, were 4d and above, and we equate 8d to a pro level... the West, as a whole, is not that far apart from where Japan was about a century ago. We have about 30 Western pros (11 from CJK qualification systems, 19 from the NAGOFed and EGF), and 3 8d in the current EGD, I believe. Let's say about-ish 40 pro level players all said.

That's not really much different from what Japan had about the time of Shusai. We have a few magazines (EGF journal, BGA's, Finding Seki, and a... Chinese? one with commented games I can't recall), podcasts and YT channels (which I would compare to mass media: magazines, radio...), a nice ammount of publishers (Mr. Fairbairn, Board'n'stones, individual publishers [*]...).

Now, the world's changed a teeny bit since. There are more distractions, and the rhythm is faster. Go is, still, a relatively sedate activity. So we might not get the explosion in activity that Japanese Go had.

And yet... Compare today's servers with Go by pedestrian mail. Or, Hell, even Telegraph. We can play against people half the world away. We can send a question to thousands of people with a single post...

Again, and so on and so forth. You know the drill. And it's nothing new, but it's been gnawing my brain for a while and I thought I'd share. Sometimes, I have the feeling we're all a tad on the pessimistic side.

Take care

[*]: Yes, Mr. Fairbairn is, technically, an individual publisher. Ahem.

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一碁一会

In Europe one of the best ways to check the health of the game in a particular country remains the EGD , for example we can argue (lament) that Sweden is as sick as a dog https://www.europeangodatabase.eu/EGD/S ... ry_code=SE
At the same time, more and more people have an awareness of the game. Whilst not wishing to pursue some lie like '605 million' , it is the probably not wrong to say that we have a swathe of retired players, armchair players (internet only), and then the ignorable fellows who learn the rules and the scooshed out of the scene like flames from a rocket.

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North Lecale