Hi, I've been trying to find Sunjang Baduk game records for a while now, but with little to no success. Even when I was in Korea it was difficult, the players I talked to didn't seem interested in that era for some reason.

There is one game in a page from Sensei's Library that has the final position and the final score, but I can't find the whole game. It was played between No Sancho - who was the Kuksu or National Master of Sunjang Baduk - and Chae Keukmun.

Another topic which has never been clear to me is about seki under the sunjang rules. Is it counted in the same way the Japanese do (which seems more likely and logical)?

You can find 14 games, including handicap games, I have researched and transcribed for the GoGoD database https://gogodonline.co.uk/. They go back to 1899.

I actually have more but I haven't entered these yet and probably never will. They mostly come from old Korean newspapers and magazines, where they are commented. Korean interest in sunjang is very limited and mostly confined to exploring the countryside looking for boards carved in rocks. There's actually more in this than meets the eye, because the different kinds of patterns used for the flower points (handicap points) tell us a lot about the history. It also seems there were local variations in rules.

The chances of finding new game records seems very remote now. Some of the earliest pros in the Hanguk Kiweon were also sunjang players but they have all died off now, and of course they made a conscious decision to eschew sunjang. Nowadays it's just trotted out for exhibition games. But a famous novelist Yi In-chik (Lee Injik) played and he was also editor and president of a newspaper (Taehan Simmun) so perhaps the odd record may turn up in his papers.

I also wrote about sunjang in a little bit of depth in The Go Companion, and this includes excerpts from an old commentary. There's a little article also in New In Go, which comes along with the GoGoD database. The commentaries look quite weird to our eyes (in fact they are in the old Korean script so look a bit weird to modern Korean eyes, too!). I think I've written about the game elsewhere, probably in academic papers, but the brain's gone fuzzy now.

There are also a few Tibetan games in the database. I first wrote about Tibetan go in Go World, but research has moved on quite a bit since then and there's a stack of ancient documents from Gansu awaiting appraisal. Which means anything in English is now way out of date.

Thanks for the reply, I'm also a fan of your work.

I think the GoGoD database is really cool, but I wish there were prices for different packages, instead of the whole thing. I might end up buying it anyway (even though I'm not really playing Go since the beginning of this year), but I would rather pay, say, 2 bucks for only those 19 games than 15 for everything, since the rest doesn't interest me right now. Most people that go for that kind of product are usually interested in the old games, so making packages with only them makes sense from a marketing point of view.

On a sidenote, since I happen to be in contact with you, I would like to ask if you want be interviewed by me. I've always wondered what knowledge people like you might have to transmit to younger generations about Go, the Asian culture and life in general; and I'm sure a lot of other people have that curiosity too. The interview would be published on my site: fanaro.com.br. It's a modest blog, but two of my interesting Go posts (the 4 Colors Go post especially) have generated more than 400 views, so it might even help get clients for the GoGoD page.

My email is philippefanaro@gmail.com, if you want to have a more private conversation.

If you're not interested, I totally understand it, but would still ask you to share the knowledge someday in the future.

Anyway, thanks again for the help.

How about thinking of the Sunjang games as costing 5 bucks, the 60,000 modern games 30 bucks, the 30,000 old games 20 bucks, New in Go articles 15 bucks, names dictionary 10 bucks, etc but then because John isn't a pharmaceutical boss the whole thing comes in at a combined discount price of 15 bucks instead of 100 .

That game can be found on the Wayback Machine.

Edit: removed actual link on request of JF.

A game that is found several places on the web (but not in GoGoD, I think) is the following.

Edit: Corrected player name, added EV.

Thanks for citing a game! But what are the names of the websites you mentioned?

Did you note I gave you two games?
Let me add a third one, a 1995 demo game between Lee Changho and Cho Namchul.
It can be found many places, also in GoGoD. The final position is given in cyberoro together with an explanation of how to count. The game is given e.g. in 101weiqi (and below).

I did not! :[]. My bad. Thanks again.

For ease, I've transcribed the first game mentioned:

I didn't answer the question about seki because I needed to check first.

I don't know whether there was any special provision. All I can say is that I have around 50 sunjang games (mostly from old Korean magazines of the 1930s) and seki appears in three of them, with no special remarks in the commentary. In one case the game ended prematurely, and in another case we know the counted result but not all the moves were given and with no clue as to how many were played. In the third case I can't be bothered to transcribe the game just for this purpose, but it is complicated in any event by the fact that the score is given as B+1.5 but there is no reference to komi. However, this was a game in the 1970s played by two old and long retired pros and so maybe the prevailing komi of the day in ordinary go was assumed. Also, the game record ended at 266 moves, not too far from the likely end, so I think it is a safe bet that this is the point at which the pros' memories failed in reconstructing the game for the sponsoring magazine. The seki is mentioned but only to point out it was a gote seki.

In one other case a bent four in the corner appears and this appears to be treated as seki, but the game finished without counting so we can't be sure - if we assume it was treated as seki (or dead as it stands, Japanese style) the resignation looks reasonable. If we assume it was a possible ko (Chinese style), the resignation may have been unwarranted. But again, I have only looked at the final position and have not transcribed the whole game.

The collection includes handicap games and also a tied game. All the older (and thus, in a sense, more genuine) games are without komi, except for the game above and one other where the komi is 5 points.

The older games are characterised also by their somewhat different terminology. The results are typically given in the form "Black has X houses, White has Y houses, Black wins by X-Y", but there are oddities such as "Black wins, White loses" and the differences are even greater in the technical terms and the coordinate system. Evidently this was all before the Japanese influence.

In short, there are still some uncertainties.

On a different tack, Andries has cited an MSO World article by me in web.archive.org. As I have done several times in the past, both on Sensei's Library and here, I would ask that all these links be removed and people desist from quoting them in future. The MSO articles are my copyright and I have not given permission to any web archivers to archive them. These organisations in theory offer to remove copyrighted material but in practice the amount of work they require of me to achieve that result is ludicrous. I have preferred to rely on the cooperation of the go community. I hope I can do so again.

Last year, I was at a class from a Chinese professor and professional player at Myongji University and he gave his students a lesson on Sunjang Baduk. I couldn't understand almost anything since I don't know Chinese, but I had made a Chinese Pro friend and he would translate things to me sometimes. We had the help of two sheets the professor had prepared for us but even then my friend told me that the explanation wasn't that clear in his opinion.

I have attached the professor's essay, and someone can maybe try to decode it. There are two diagrams for the seki explanation and also a final one on counting.

The reason why I had not mentioned all this before is because: it doesn't come from a Korean; I don't know if this info is that reliable since it doesn't come with references; and the explanations seem very short.

I don't read the Chinese, but the bottom picture shows Black making seki with sente instead of letting White make independent life by capturing the three Black stones. If White captures the three stones then by regular territory scoring he gets 5 pts. in the corner (3 stones plus 2 pts. of territory), while Black gets 4 pts. (2 stones plus 2 pts. of territory). By Sunjang Baduk scoring White gets 6 pts. after removing stones and Black gets 2 pts. plus maybe 2 more pts. if Black can remove 2 stones on the edge. But if, as in the diagram, Black throws in a stone, then the corner is seki.

Edit: I looked up the Chinese for what the text calls White A, the stone that captures . It calls it a superfluous stone. If that means that it is removed for counting, then territory is counted in seki.

The top picture shows how who fills a dame can make a difference of 3 pts., because if Black fills the dame Black can remove 3 stones instead of 2 in the corner, while if White fills the dame White can remove 2 stones from the middle.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.