The Winter 2015 edition of the GoGoD database is now available with 86,093 games. (http://gogodonline.co.uk/) It should also be available with SmartGo Kifu around mid-January.

Notable additions include the earliest quintuple ko (1937), which means we now have two games with alleged quintuple kos. There are also new games for Takagawa, Hashimoto (x3), Kitani, Genan (x5), and Shusai, and several more of the early 20th century games collected in China by Go Seigen.

No change at the top of the list of most games: Cho Chikun 2111 and Cho Hun-hyeon 2026 are still well ahead of the chasing pack.

Because there are now several players having the same name, this edition has been extensively updated (maybe a couple of thousand files) to distinguish them all clearly.

But in my view the main addition is lots of Shin Fuseki games. Transcribing these has really opened my eyes to this revolution. I can now see that Shin Fuseki was something of a misnomer, because both josekis and the middle game saw incredible changes. Middle-game fighting was very often not about contact with the enemy but about jockeying for space and influence in a kind of shadow boxing, and josekis too were intricate minuets where the players often gave the impression of not knowing the steps and ending up treading on their own toes. The result in both cases was a new palette of tactics. One small detail as an example: I noticed an unusually large number of open-space nobis (i.e. not responding to a contact play by the opponent). All these games were at 8 or 11 hours each and so all these weird new moves were backed by intensive cogitation. I began to wonder whether the Shin Fuseki phase passed simply because it was such hard work.

Here is one example of a Shin Fuseki opening (Sekiyama-Iwamoto). It is far from the most extreme but perhaps close to the median:



The following example, however (Fujisawa-Kato), will illustrate a little the non-fuseki aspects I am talking about.



We are lucky that with all these 1930s games the commentary style was for both players to give their post-game relections, so we can tell what aspects troubled them.

You don't need any commentary, though, to raise eyebrows at White's initial play in the upper right, but White 12 was explained by Fujisawa as his attempt to control the "guts" of the strategy (he also gave quite a few lines to show possible variations - White 14 taxed him for 50 minutes).

When it came to White 22 Fujisawa offered the insight that he agonised over this as opposed to a move on the lower side, and then he was unsure about White 24 as opposed to connection one point to the right. Remarkably the reason for his long ponder over this became apparent late in the game when the choice he made here led to a swap of this quarter of the board for the lower right quarter of the board, a truly massive trade.

For his part, Black revealed that he had decided to take territory early as his response to White's influence-based game. But do note that it was influence-based not thickness-based. In fact White got no thickness anywhere, hence his need to go for a sacrifice and trade. Black had also spotted the flaws in White's shape and so 25 was not really an example of being to close to thickness. Black added that he played this because he was unsure where to play on the lower side. Recall that the sanrensei shape was then novel - indeed the poster boy of Shin Fuseki.

You will also see some shadow-boxing tactics in the upper left.

Moves 28 and 34 are not the best examples of open-space "nobis" (strictly narabi and burasagari), but are instances nevertheless. The shimari 28 is not uncommon today but then it was still very, very rare and this in fact was the first example where a moyo around it had not yet been completed. Fujisawa said he did not know whether it was good or bad but chose it because it seemed the most flexible move.

However, he decided in retrospect that 34 was bad (it gave Black the momentum-making move 35). My point about this sort of move is not that you don't see it nowadays, but that then it seemed that it was often preferred more then, and direct contact was preferred less - in Shin Fuseki games.

PS An old version of the Names Dictionary and the New In Go archive should be available in the same download area. I haven't been able to finish the new Xml version of Names.

Thank you for updating GoGoD and clearly distinguishing names. How many games of 2015 are included?

The upper right white group I call a 'group of influence stones'. One more move at e.g. N13 would create ordinary thickness because of connecting and defending life so that Black then cannot directly attack connection or life.

I got curious how this compared with my collection and got a copy of GoGoD today.
Beautiful work! So now I can answer RJ's question: 2729.
I can also answer my own question, and see that about three quarters of my 30000
Japanese pro games are also in GoGoD, and one quarter is new.
Will study GoGoD in more detail later.

As a side remark: I did not see the announced Names Dictionary.

JF's daughter was so kind as to supply the missing Name dictionary. It contains 3410 names, and is up-to-date to roughly end 2005.

Some time ago, logan published 19879 games (as pdf, easily converted to sgf) and one might wonder whether these were from GoGoD. I compared the games by Rin Kaiho. And yes, no doubt they were. There are common typos, like "Nihon Ki-in direcor" in 1961-11-27a.sgf, or the missing & in 1964-03-27a.sgf, or the funny symbol at the end of PW in 1968-02-06b.sgf. A lot of metainformation (PC, TM, OH, RU, SO, GC) was stripped, Complicated RE fields were truncated (e.g. from W+Jigo, or from W+7.5 {moves beyond 172 not known}, to just W+). In a number of cases the game as given by logan is one to six moves shorter than the game as given in the Winter 2015 GoGoD. I have seen no cases where logan had information not present in GoGoD.

I just purchased the GOGOD Winter 2015 download.

Is anyone capable of providing an old Version of the encyclopedia an GOSCORER as they are no longer part of GOGOD? Or would this be some kind of copyright violation?

Also, which Software are you guys using to search through the games? They are not sorted by names so it's hard to find a specific kifu.

Besides that, awesome collection worth every penny

The program GoLibrary2 included in the GoGoD is my choice of name or other free text search.

Cheers,
Vesa

There is no Software bundled in the 2015 bundle.

Any place i can get that?

In a Linux environment the command-line utility sgfinfo allows you to search on name, date, handicap, board size, B/W pattern, specific moves, signature, etc., and arbitrary combinations of these.