Follow the link below and you will see table.
http://www.cyberoro.com/news/news_view. ... num=521999

I have problem posting image.

Here is the image (replaced the square brackets in URL with hex values).

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be immersed

OH wow, park is only 2 points behind ke jie now!

Thanks for info.

And Iyama is not even in the top 20! Tisk tisk, this will cause heartburn for some on this forum.

My heart didn't burn to see Iyama outside the top 20 when that list was posted a few weeks ago, but it was gently warmed with amusement today when I saw a new post from by78, and clicked through to see it moaning about Iyama as I suspected.

World Ranking as of 8/31/16,

Tisk tisk, Iyama at #31? But Goratings.org, favored by many a folks here, has Iyama at #5. I smell an anti-Japan bias.

It will be nice the day that professional players are respected for who they are, rather than known only for the country they represent.

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be immersed

One entry climbing the ratings (#55 here, #96 goratings.org) that I found interesting was Yulin Tong 4p, who visited the European and then US Go Congress. He won all his games at the EGC, but Mark Lee scored a magical comeback against him at the USGC.

iyama plays so few international games. since 2014 his record internationally seems to be 4 wins, 6 losses, mostly against very top players, so not bad. His low ranking does seem doubtful.

Since we can't avoid the topic, these ratings handle Japanese players very inconsistently. In June 2014, it rated Iyama 5th, and Yamashita 31st. Today it rates Iyama 31st. So the judgment of the ratings is apparently that Iyama in 2016 is almost the same strength as Yamashita in 2014.* That's just wrong. Iyama seems stronger today than he was in 2014 (when he was busy losing the Oza and Tengen), and I think it's clear enough that he's been consistently stronger than all other Japanese players for the past 5 years.

That doesn't mean you have to believe goratings. It just means that these ratings are doing something wrong.

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Occupy Babel!

No, the rating doesn't imply that Iyama is almost of the 'same strength' as Takao in 2014. It simply doesn't. You are assuming that all other players's strength have remained constant, which isn't the case. The explanation I can give is that Dr. Park's ranking has had better input (i.e. more games) to make the ranking more accurate. And real-world results seem to bear that out.

Iyama could well lose the Meijin to Takao this year. Mind you, Takao really is quite weak internationally. What does that tell you about Iyama's playing strength?

I personally think the level of Japanese Go has been falling precipitously in the past few years so that Iyama's competition is getting weaker by the day. This justifies Iyama's low ranking. Of course, Iyama himself doesn't care. If he did, he'd play more internationally.

Bottom line: 31st is a realistic ranking. I personally think Iyama's ranking might be too high. He could well be out of top 40 or 50 in reality.

I had an asterisk in my post and was going to write something, but I didn't so here goes. You can't make a perfect comparison. But over the course of two years, playing against roughly the same mix of players, ordinal rankings are going to be quite relevant. You can't say that because Ke Jie is #1 in 2016, and Park Junghwan was #1 in 2014, that they're exactly the same. But you can say that because Ke Jie is #1 in 2016, and Kono Rin was #20 in 2014, Ke Jie is stronger today than Kono Rin was then. Or do you disagree?

If it were comparing 1980 and 2016, I would agree that the comparison is completely meaningless. Even five or ten years could be a problem. But two years is not so long. Most of the players involved are the same. Some have gotten better, some have gotten worse.

I doubt it. Why do you think it is? You can point to how Ichiriki Ryo won three in a row in the Nongshim, and beat Li Qincheng, how Murakawa beat Gu Li, or how Kyo Kagen and Ichiriki have done well in the Globis. And it's not like the older generation of players had wonderful results. For Japan in 2014, there were some successes, but you can also point to a complete wipe-out in the Bailing Cup and the LG Cup. Maybe they're not getting better, but they seem to be doing about the same: consistently losing with the occasional exciting win.

Irrelevant! My point is not that Iyama is too low. I happen to suspect that's true. It's that the ratings are internally inconsistent.

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Occupy Babel!

Maybe it's time prof. remi ask dr. park where did he get the data from? or which method does he use (I'm not aware of his publication possibly because of language barrier)? But goratings does successfully push Japanese pro to the bottom (only 8 pro in top 100 and 81 in bottom 100), Iyama Yuta is 'innocent until proven guilty' case (but at least in goratings you can click through each player's history and judge them by yourself! No hidden agenda)

by78 might take it as a "JOF" opinion (or even "IOF-Iyama only fan" if you'd like) , but here are my 2 cents:

Iyama started to become head and shoulder stronger than other Japanese players in 2011-2013, and at such time, I would rank him around 20-30 in the world, since he can beat the very top players in a good day (e.g Bosai Cup, Asian TV Cup), but he can lose to much lower ranks players, and his results versus top Chinese players were quite bad (I still remember his lost to Chen Yaoye and Zhou Ruiyang at the moment).

In 2014-2015, he still played few international matches, but almost every games were against top players, and his results weren't bad at all at the time. With the wins to Park JH, Mi Yuting, Park Yeonghun, Huang Yunsong...I think he deserved a place in the top 15, if not top 10 (again, at such moment).

His game with Lee SD in the last Nongshim Cup was quite disappointing to me, and his recent domestic records seem not very good, so yeah, he can fall to 25-30 at the moment. But let's see, he still plays to few games compared to any other Chinese/Korean players in the top 50.

And if we talk about his competitors in Japan, e.g whether they rank 50-100 or 150-200 in the world, I would say that all of them seems to play very few matches against Korean/Chinese pros, so taking any single example will not be accurate, e.g Takao or Yamashita may be "weak internationally", but Kono Rin or Ichikiri Ryo did considerably better. I would say that Iyama's domestic competitors are becoming a bit better in the last 3-4 years (compare to the period before after Cho U started to go down).

IMO, a lot of people take these ratings systems too seriously. They're just estimates and kind of for fun. If you don't like the ordering, make your own list from your own data.

What's the big deal?

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be immersed

*shrug* They're ratings. It seems like if they're accurate that's better than being inaccurate. Could just be me.

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Occupy Babel!

What is "accurate"? Ability to predict game outcome? Under what conditions? Who is playing white? What are the player's styles? How many games did the players each play last week? Are they in good physical condition? Is it a best-of-five match? How much money is at stake? Do the players have a history between one another?

My view is that these ranking systems are entertaining and can perhaps give an indication toward the chances of a particular player. But it's just a guess, limited by several unknown variables and a limited set of data.

So your own view of someone's placement differs from this particular limited model. That's okay! The weather report said it was going to rain last Thursday. Sometimes it's wrong. Don't like that weather station? That's ok, too!

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be immersed

Although Iyama's rating may feel low to what many believe his ability is, it's not all that out of ordinary. He was at No. 22 in the ranking just two weeks prior (8/16), so the chart can definitely fluctuate a lot, more so than goratings. The difference between his raw rating score and Li Qicheng's (No. 12) is smaller than the difference between Lee Sedol and Ke/Park. Being consistent against better competitions is rewarded, and I like that. Kim Jiseok, for example, is No. 8 at goratings, but his performance this year suggests he is probably closer to the No. 18 on this cart. Similarly for Jiang Weijie, a former world champ, and we can form that opinion because they play against top-50 players all the time in domestic leagues or selections to represent the countries in international tournaments. Harder to get that data for Iyama.