2016 Pro qualification tourney, China.

I think China's lead over Korea and Japan will last a while longer and might get even wider.

wow
how many entrants are there? how does this compare to Japan or Korea?

Notice how many of them wear glasses. I read something a few weeks ago that said that as many as 80% of the younger generation wear glasses, compared to 20% two generations ago. It was attributed to lack of natural light because they don't spend as much time outsides as formerly.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

There are some comments about the Japanese professional qualification tournament in this thread about Antti Tormanen: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=10532&hilit=antti&start=20. I skimmed that thread, and I think it says that there's a 16 person tournament (10 A class insei, plus 6 others).

Iirc, there are also separate tournaments for the Kansai Ki-in, maybe also the Kansai branch of the Nihon Ki-in?

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Occupy Babel!

Does anybody know the format of the chinese pro exam? I can't imagine all those players doing a round robin as the 16 finalists do in Japan. Based on the numbers, it looks more like a prelim.

If you take all the prelims in Japan into account, together with the insei league, where they fight for the 10 places in the pro exam, the number isn't small either.

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If something sank it might be a treasure. And 2kyu advice is not necessarily Dan repertoire..

Kansai Kiin works a bit differently. Rather than a big tournament, it's mostly about qualifying the top insei as good enough. A year can go by with no new professionals.

The Osaka and Chubu branches of the Nihon Kiin also have pro tests separate from the Tokyo branch.

A lot of theses kids are probably as strong as many top-50 Japanese pros, if not stronger. Quite a few of them could probably take out a top-10 Japanese pro.

Such a surfeit of talent...

I'm from Singapore where we rank as #1, or near #1 in terms of myopia in children. I've read the same studies on lack of natural sunlight being a cause for myopia, and my own experiences in my life concur with it. I turned myopic after I spent a month during the holidays playing Nintendo and rarely stepping out of the house. I'm trying to get my son exposure to the sun every day, and so far, so good with his vision (he's 6).

Back to the original topic - there's a wonderful 5 part documentary on Go made by CCTV, and one of the segments features the Chinese pro qualification tournament: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuFzvUF ... I#t=30m58s You can see the same hall in the picture within the documentary segment.

Isn't it amazing what having more than a billion people in one country can do??

I think your judgement is incorrect and insulting to the Japanese professional Go scene, especially the latter statement regarding top-10 pros. This isn't the finals of a big Chinese tournament, this is a qualification tournament to become a professional *ONE* dan. When was the last time you saw a Chinese 1p defeat a top 10 Japanese professional?

Calling Japanaese pros weak is kind of by78's hobby...

But:
First to mind is the recent Globis cup final (2016-04-24), in which Chinese Li Qincheng 1p (who admittedly became pro quite a few years ago but for some reason didn't get 2p until just a few months ago, his nickname was "the strongest 1p", he's in the Chinese top 20 going on 10) beat Hsu Chiayuan (Kyo Kagen) 3p who is a rising young Japanese star that goratings.org puts as the #5 Japanese.
http://www.go4go.net/go/games/sgfview/53739

Ah I see. I shall not feed the troll further.



Wow, learn something new everyday! But I guess a 1p who has been professional for a few years, regardless of promotion, has had a chance to grow within the professional system, which is different from a newly minted pro. I wonder what's the story behind Li Qincheng's lack of promotion. He has been pro for 7 years (1 dan on 2009-07-25 according to SL). Promoted to 2 dan only in May 2016. Is this some form of sandbagging in professional Go?

Welcome back!

I don't know, maybe some people more familiar with the Chinese promotion rules can enlighten us. I know you get straight to 9p for winning a major international title (so the youth Globis cup doesn't count, though would seem reasonable to me to have some lower dan promotion for such lower tier titles) or coming second twice (e.g. Chen Yaoye). In Japan you get 2 dan for winning 30 games as a 1 dan, so I assume the Chinese don't have any win x games as n dan to promote to n + 1 dan as Li will certainly have done that for any plausible value of x in his 7 years. I imagine he probably doesn't care much about his rank (as pros in Japan used to as it affected their game fees), but more about getting stronger and his place in the Chinese rating list (he's #11 in June: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=13425). It wouldn't surprise me if he leapfrogged to 9p in a few years by winning an international title (Ke Jie went from 4p to 9p by winning the Bailing cup, and Tang Weixing from 3p to 9p for winning the Samsung cup).

This was last year's info but I think it is still valid.

viewtopic.php?p=191385#p191385

[Edit] some of the relevant info:

About 370 entered 2015 male pro qualification for 20 spots in 2015(I just looked up this year's number and it was 312 competing in preliminary stage plus 30 (last year's 21-50) waiting in final stage so total 342). Around 100 players participated in the female pro qualification for 5 spots last year(exactly 100 entries this year).

The link above has more details of the qualification tournament format.

Korean pro qualification is a little more complicated. But roughly there are 12 spots each year (2 out of 12 spots are for female pros. The number of female new pros will grow to 4 starting in 2016) plus unlimited pro qualification points promotions for amateurs.

Actually I do not think by78's statement is completely off base. IMHO the gap between a new pro and a top ranked one is surprisingly narrow these days. For example, due to the open nature of some international tournaments and smaller number of pros in Korea their inseis have more opportunity to participate in these international tournaments (usually entered as amateur) and they constantly beat Japanese/Korean/Chinese pros (a recent case is An Jungki won 5 in a row to get into final stage of LG cup in May last year and then beat Chen Yaoye to advance and lost to the eventual champion Kang Dongyun. An was ranked 6th among Korean inseis at the time and failed the pro exam in February before the surprising performance in LG cup. Now An is a middling pro ranked 163 on goratings.com). I do not think Korean inseis are particularly strong compared to Chinese new pros. If An could beat Chen Yaoye when he was still an insei it would not surprise me that a few of these new pros can take out some top 10 Japanese pros.

These discussions are always hypothetical.

In Aja's keynote speech at the US Go Congress, he mentioned that a 75% win rate meant about 1 stone difference in strength. That means a guy one stone weaker still wins 25% of the time.

At pro level, 1 stone is huge.

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be immersed

The thing is, the Li Qincheng example proves too much. Li Qincheng can beat top Japanese players, but he can also beat top Chinese players. It is evidence of the point that an exceptional 1p may be very close to the top players.

Whether the Chinese population is the defining factor is not really clear. It seems like China is a bit ahead of Korea these days, but the biggest gap is the China/Korea vs. Japan gap. Japan has more people than Korea, but is definitely lagging behind. And China has > 10x the population of Korea but is only ahead of Korea by a bit.

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Occupy Babel!

hyperpape, you may be correct. The point I am trying to make is, even if someone "can beat" another person, it doesn't mean that they are stronger. In the example I gave, someone one stone weaker "can beat" the other guy 25% of the time.

Nonetheless, my discussion is also hypothetical, and I know nothing of Li Qincheng. It could very well be that he is stronger than some top professionals. I'm not sure.

I'd simply like to point out that just because someone has beaten someone else, it doesn't necessarily mean that they are close in strength.

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be immersed

Kirby, I edited my post a little. Your post only showed up when I was submitting mine. My post is a response to the mention of Li higher up in the thread.

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Occupy Babel!