But to imagine that at 64 Cho Chikun is around about the same strength as Yi Ch'ang-ho at 35 seems to me to be far too implausible to be credible.
Cho is 54 years old.
China got its first pros during the Nie Weiping era, and Korea got its first pros during the Cho Hunhyeon era.
That's 80's and 90's, before that, there were no pros in either country.
Korea had pro system in 60s. Cho HunHyun contributed a lot to make Korea's Baduk stronger since he came back from Japan. But he is not the first pro in Korea.
pardon me if I ask this in the wrong place, but Xie made it to the top 10 in earning list, yet Suzuki Ayumi and Iwamaru Taira were the two promoted based on the earnings. how do they count the earnings? does earning from teaching/events (teaching/simul games) also added to the promotion criteria?
In chess there are some players who have remained world class players as they got older.
Vassily Smyslov made it to the quarter finals of the Candidate matches for the World Chess Championship at age 62, before losing to Gary Kasparov who went on to become World Champion.
Victor Kortchnoi played a World Championship Match at age 50 against Karpov and remained pretty strong into his 60s.
Mikhail Botvinnik won a World Championship Match at age 50.
Emanuel Lasker won the 1924 New York International Chess Tournament at age 55, 1.5 points ahead of a very strong field that included many of the strongest players of the day.
Of course, you could say these are the exceptions that prove the rule. Excelling at intellectual games seems to require a lot of mental energy and competitive drive and for most people these tend to diminish as they get older. But experience also counts for something, and I don't see any reason why someone who remains fit and maintains a high level of motivation couldn't stay competitive into their 60s.
Let's have some correctives, to which I'll add some personal musings.
1. Cho is 54. I either mistyped or miscounted - don't know which.
2. Pro activity in Korea is not recent. In Korea it is usually counted as starting in 1945 when Cho Nam-ch'eol, recently back from Japan, started the ball rolling. It wasn't the first organisation of top players but what made it "professional" was rejection of gambling go. The Hanguk Kiweon started in 1955. Cho Hun-hyeon's later contribution was to raise the bar to world level.
3. Pro activity in China is not recent. Japanese style grades were adopted in 1982, but before that it was a long era of shamateurism. Groups of pros coming together as a guild can be dated back to the Shanghai Go Association in 1933 under Gu Shuiru and Guo Tisheng. Gu had studied under Hirose Heijiro in Japan, was given 4-dan pro (then a high grade) by the Nihon Ki-in and lived the life of a pro in China (he had columns in Shanghai and Tianjin newspapers). The Chinese Revolution and the Cultural Revolution obviously played havoc with earning any kind of an intellectual living in China, but pro go is not a recent thing there.
4. Good oldies in go are nothing new. Even in recent times, Sakata was quite old before he started clocking up titles. Fujisawa Hideyuki won the Oza in 1992 at age 67.
5. The conditions in the CJK countries vary enormously - so much so that this imperils easy comparisons. Some random examples not usually considered. Oldies in Japan have a few advantages: one is less travel. Higher ranked and thus usually senior players get home advantage, and even where travel is required it is far less onerous than in China. Another advantage, probably, is more sensible time limits than in (especially) Korea. The fact that go is seen as an "old man's game" in Japan may also have an effect - sponsors presumably aim at the fan base, and may bias invitations or playing conditions towards the older players. China, putting a high priority on international success instead, favours a system of trainers and coaches. These positions provide comfy spots for older players who can effectively and happily retire from active play early. Older players in Korea are the worst off at the moment, and their bitterest gripe is against the Mickey Mouse time limits, but that is the result of go sponsors there favouring tv and the internet to a degree far exceeding Japan especially (still newspaper driven) and China. Korea is also the country where veneration of the old is by far the strongest. But every action has a reaction. Young people - the main fan base in Korea - possibly welcome the chance to see the young trump the old for a change.
6. "Which country is the strongest?" is only one question. Other valid questions are: "In which country is go the healthiest? and "Which country produces the best go?" Personally, I think that on current patterns go is more likely to have a long and healthy life in China and Japan than in Korea, and I think China and Japan also produce better games. China has many more good games, but as the Chinese do greatly respect the two-day games in Japan, I think we should, too. Korea comes out low in those assessments, in my view. However, it may well currently have the players with the best raw talent.
7. If we take the (I think) useful stance of saying what we would each do to improve go in each country, I'm not sure that China needs to change anything for the men, but it could probably do more for women's go (it doesn't at present because there is not enough international kudos to be gained). Korea needs to get back to sensible time limits and, if a magic wand could be waved, get more stable sponsorship. Japan needs to engage more with international go, and to accept the need for a training/coaching squad at that level.
8. However, although I believe all these changes would benefit go in each country, I see few signs that they are being addressed. Focus instead seems to be on the internationalisation of go. China's eyes seem to be on spreading go in the other countries of Asia. Japan seems stuck in the mindset of promoting go in Europe and America. Korea seems somewhere in-between.
Good oldies are nothing new--if anything, good younguns are the development. When Rin Kaiho challenged for the Meijin at 23, that was a shock. It's less pronounced, but even Japan has seen its go become more youthful, if you take the long view of a half century.
I've attached a graph of the age of Fujitsu cup winners over the tournament's history. I just used "win year - birth year" so there may be some off-by-1 errors due to birthdays. I also fitted a cubic polynomial to the data, to get a rough idea of general trend. There are two things that stand out: (1) An overall decline in age, especially during 2002-2007 (2) A slight uptick over the last few years, possibly providing support for JF's theory that the wave of youth has peaked.
I chose Fujitsu Cup because it is the longest running international tournament. It would be quite interesting to do some graphs for other titles, like maybe Honinbo (going much further back). One tournament isn't really enough data to provide a strong conclusion.
One other small note: the older winners are not all Japanese. Cho Hun-hyeon won twice in 2000 and 2001, when he was 47 and 48. The only older winner was Otake Hideo, who was 50 when he won.
It just now caught my eye, but John noted that Japan was the only country to have a woman in the top ten, but he used the tournament winnings for the Japanese list. Without getting into an argument about the relative merits of various ratings, Japan would not have had a woman in the top ten if the list were computed by the same methods as the Chinese and Korean ratings.
You only have one teen in the top ten, but four twenty year olds, and four more teens in the top 20.
Since John has previously referred to flash in the pan players, I also took the time to see how many of the players from the August 2005 ratings were still in the top 20. If I haven't made a mistake, fourteen are still in the top twenty--which seems pretty consistent after five years.
Using Valerio's list: Yu Ch'ang-hyeok dropped from 8th to 36th Cho Hun-hyeon dropped from 9th to 28th. Kim Seong-ryong was 12th, and does not appear now. Kim Chu-ho was 14th and dropped to 38th. Ok Teuk-chin was 16th, and does not appear now. Yi Heui-seong dropped from 18th to 32nd.
We can now add Chinese money earnings to the mix for 2010.
At the top Kong Jie won 3.8 million yuan or roughly US$ 575,000. He was well ahead of Gu Li on 2.2m yuan ($336,000). In 10th place was Gu Lingyi at 450,000 yuan ($68,000).
I made a comment elsewhere that Chinese go looked to me to be in a long-term healthy state. These figures bear that out, I think.
Allowing (by licking a finger and sticking it up in the wind) for the lower standard of living in China, Kong's total will compare very well with Cho U's £1.1m in Japan. At any rate, I think we may safely assume that Kong has discovered many new friends he never knew he had.
Gu Lingyi's 10th place compares with O Meien's $170,000 equivalent in Japan.
In Japan, at least, the gap between 1st and 10th place varies enormously from year to year - for the past few years it has vacillated in the range of about 3:1 ~ 8:1.
I did the same thing for Chinese ratings from 2005. They only had 1 teenager then (Peng Quan).
I counted 9 players who left the top twenty between 2005 and 2010--a higher rate of turnover than in Korea. In many ways, that fits with the trend that China has caught up to Korea in recent years--they were still adding new players who were stronger than the ones they replaced in 2005.
For reference, the 9 were Wang Lei Sr, Yu Bin, Luo Xihe, Ma Xiaochun, Liu Shizhen, Ding Wei, Huang Yizhong, Wang Yuhui and Shao Weigang.
