Life In 19x19

gowan wrote:Winning a tournament requires freedom from blunders but great creativity seems to me to be accompanied by frequency of blunders, consider a great player like Fujisawa Hideyuki.

My understanding of his game was that he was considered the best at the opening, or the first 50 or so moves, and that his blunders tended to be endgame mistakes. I'm not sure how closely you can relate the two, apart from that a lot of effort in the opening may result in fatigue taking its toll in the endgame sometimes.

Yup, travel conflict with the Kisei (he'll be playing the second day of the Kisei the night before he'd have to compete in China). A few years ago, there was talk of adjusting Japanese schedules to accommodate more international competition. I wonder if the initiative died, or if Iyama simply doesn't care to push it.

gowan wrote:There seems to be wide acceptance of the statement that Go Seigen was the best player in the world from approximately the late 1930's to the 1950's or thereabouts. But how many tournaments did he win? Winning a long match is different from winning a tournament.

Go Seigen dominated every top player of his day in the most serious of matches. Also, it is tough to fault someone for not winning tournaments in an era when tournaments were rare. The Meijin tournament began in the 60s and Go Seigen was not the same after his car accident in 1960. The Honinbo Tournament began earlier but my memory is that he did not participate in more than a handful of those because of conflicts with the Nihon Ki-in.

gowan wrote:Go Seigen made many innovations in joseki, opening theory, etc.

And he beat the snot out of every top player of his day in matches that were matters of honor. Sometimes to the point that they became obsessed with him.

gowan wrote:Winning a tournament requires freedom from blunders but great creativity seems to me to be accompanied by frequency of blunders, consider a great player like Fujisawa Hideyuki.

Fujisawa won a lot of tournaments. The lasting image of him is that he was the best when he cared. The Kisei title was like THE de facto world championship during his era. To put it in contemporary terms, it was like an international tournament that attracted every top 40 player in the world with a $2,000,000 prize for the winner. Now suppose that someone won this tournament several years in a row at age 40. On top of that, suppose that this player would drink, smoke, gamble, and party most of the year and quit those vices cold turkey one month before the tournament so that he could prepare. That person would get many votes for being the best in the world.

This was essentially Shuko during his run of six Kisei titles, which began when he was 51 years old. He was no longer considered the best after that ended, which was followed by the Kobayashi-Cho era. Of course, many people still believed that he had the best understanding of go, but that is different from being the best at playing go.