I have completed conversion (and rather large expansion) of my names dictionary to XML format. While testing a program to use this data I compiled some stats on promotions which may be of interest.

For the period 2001 to 2010 inclusive, the annual number of promotions worldwide to each pro grade averaged out as follows:

1d 40.8
2d 32.3
3d 25.6
4d 17.1
5d 16.3
6d 10.8
7d 11.3
8d 8.5
9d 7.0

No real surprises there, perhaps, and the data was remarkably stable year on year.

I haven't got round to counting the number of active pros, but it must be around 1,500. At the same time I happened to come across some figures for chess pros. Emil Sutovsky. president of the Association of Chess Professionals, estimates there are around 1,500 active grandmasters playing competitively and earning a living from chess. But only 200 of them earn their living exclusively from playing in competitions. Of these only the top 20 earned well and the rest of the 200 struggled. The 1,300 who rely on income away from the tournament hall apparently rely mainly on coaching rather than writing.

The shape of the profession is probably very similar in go, but it seems that go players as a whole do rather better. I'd say that at least 50 earn well from competitions alone, and the very top players certainly earn more than Magnus Carlsen (and over a much longer number of years, probably).

I wonder how long it will take for the "mesofact" (http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/i ... t_of_date/) that 9-dan means nothing to leave people's minds. It will still always be true that some 9 dans will be past their prime, but for younger players it's absolutely meaningful. You still can't say a 9 dan is necessarily stronger than a 7 dan (or even a 1 dan), but under the new systems, it typically means that a player was, for some period of time, playing at an elite level.

Taking Japan, with which I'm most familiar, here's who I know about from the under 40 crowd (I probably missed someone who made 8 dan via win count):

9 dan: Yamashita Keigo (38), Cho U (36), Kono Rin (~35), Iyama Yuta (27)
8 dan: Han Zenki (39), Ko Iso (29), Murakawa Daisuke (25) Ida Atsushi (22)

_________________
Occupy Babel!

What is your source for the claim that top Go players earn more than the top Chess players? Not disputing it, I just know very little about how much top go professionals earn. I know Magnus Carlson earned ~$600-700K for each of his wins in his past two world championship matches. No doubt he also earns more from other tournaments and sponsorships - he has a chess app named after him, for example. Whereas, to my knowledge, the top paying Go tournaments pay ~$400K, and don't necessarily happen every year (e.g. Ing cup). Are there just more reasonably paying Go tournaments out there?

According to this random page I found [1], Lee Sedol made about 1.4 billion won in prize money in 2014. That's about 1,256,108 USD. Not all pros have it that well, though.

According to this page [2], average for Korean pros can be more along the lines of around 24 million won (about 21,533 USD). Someone at the Hanguk Kiwon said that pros that are doing well may expect to make around 100 million won (around 89,722 USD), and pros in a slump can expect something like 10 million won (around 8972 USD)... So there's quite a bit of variation in earnings.

I should note that Korean wages, in general, seem a bit lower than in the US - there are a lot of complicated factors like money that's accumulated in the family and passed down, parents buying your house for you, etc.

[1]http://news.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2015/01/07/2015010702097.html
[2]http://www.newscj.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=49134

_________________
be immersed

Is it fair to say most make much less.





NBA (1..418): $30M+ ... $543K . ^(*)
NFL (1..20, post-taxes): $15M ... $8M .
MLB (1..1647): $34M ... $1000 .
PGA (1..370): $9M ... $5984 .


^(*) All in US$.

Rather, I think there are still too many people who thinks that pro dan ranks mean anything. They say someone is "2p strength" or someone is "5p strength", as if 5ps should be stronger than 2ps.

9 dans are a special case, in that you need to win a major tournament to become a 9d realistically (at least in China/Korea nowadays, not sure about Japan). But 1-8d really doesn't say much.

Japanese promotion system: http://senseis.xmp.net/?NihonKiInNewPromotionSystem. It's more lenient than China, but it's still designed so that few players reach 8 or 9 dan.

I would say that Japanese ranks from 6d-9d tell you something non-trivial about strength: viewtopic.php?p=175541#p175541. You're right that saying "x is 5p strength, 7p strength, 2p strength" is a bad way to talk: there's not one strength that all players of the same rank have. There can be a lot of cases: a 3p may be one of the strongest Japanese players (http://senseis.xmp.net/?KyoKagen). But it means something when an under 20 player is 7p, and it also is meaningful if a 30 year old has stayed at 5d.

The last time I had this discussion, I believe Li Qincheng was the only top 50 player who was a 1p or 2p. Guess who just made 9p?

_________________
Occupy Babel!

This made me realize: the information about Japanese promotions is all before the tournament was restructured. With the new format, is there still a 7d promotion associated with it? Maybe for making the S-league?

_________________
Occupy Babel!

There is also an official reference to the Nihon Ki-in promotion system.
See http://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/player/rank.html
or slightly language-challenged http://www.nihonkiin.or.jp.e.qs.hp.transer.com/player/rank.html.

Cheers,
Vesa

It's interesting, though perhaps also perplexing, that for promotions based on number of career wins, the Japanese allow games against amateurs in the Ryusei and Agon-Kiriyama Cup, but in the case of most international events such as the Samsung and LG and Bailing International, they exclude games in the preliminaries.

I would have thought allowing these prelim games would be an easy way to encourage young pros to go and get much needed international experience (some already go anyway, of course).