SENKO CUP World Go Women´s Championship 2018

website: http://www.senkocupwgwc.net/

2018-03-14~16

This looks like the replacement of the Japanese domestic Senko Cup that was held twice before.

8 players:

Fujisawa Rina, Xie Yimin, Mukai Chiaki, Nyu Eiko (JP)
Yu Zhiying (CN)
Choi Jeong (KR)
Hei Jiajia (TW, formally representing Chinese Taipei)
Natalia Kovaleva (EU)

Format:

Japanese rule with 6.5-point komi.
2 hours main time followed by 1-minute byoyomi

Prize money:

1st place: 10 million JPY
2nd place: 3 million JPY
3rd place: 2 million JPY
4th place: 1 million JPY

A separate post to hold my informal comment.

The Japanese sponsors are naughty again to hold another 'World Go Championship', with very limited places and strongly biased for their own players, who may I say, are much weaker than the Korean and Chinese opponents.

Hmmm, 4 to 1. I suppose it reduces the chance of the Japanese sponsors giving their money to foreigners and that's their prerogative, but as you say then calling it a "World" championship is rather cheeky.

The players, with goratings overall and women's rank are:
- Choi 124, 1
- Yu 183, 2
- Rui Naiwei in this gap, I'd like to see her play! plus 10 other top Korean and Chinese women.
- Fujisawa 335, 13
- Xie 477, 30
- Hei 578, I got bored counting
- Mukai 636
- Nyu 716
- Kovaleva 953

Yu and Choi are so far ahead, I think they are still favourites. I hope they aren't in the same half of the draw, let alone paired in first round.

Not surprised, Yu and Choi are in the same half.

The draw, as usual, avoids games between players with the same representation...

They could try 'international'...

Hei 7p-50
Mukiai 5p-60
Nyu 2p-73
Kovaleva-197

_________________
On Go proverbs:
"A fine Gotation is a diamond in the hand of a dan of wit and a pebble in the hand of a kyu" —Joseph Raux misquoted.

Results of first round were as expected.
Hei Jiajia / Joanne Missingham beat Nyu Eiko
Yu Zhiying beat Xie Yimin
Choi Jung beat Mukai Chiaki (dramatic big ko at end!)
Fujisawa Rina beat Natalia Kovaleva

So all the Japanese gone, except Fujisawa who had the weak westener draw. Choi and Yu are in the same half, semi-finals:
Yu vs Choi
Hei vs Fusjisawa.

I think this is the second time we have had this sort of comment from the same person, and it is very "naughty". Do the first three words "the Japanese sponsors" as opposed to "the sponsors" tell us something? Is that against the Terms and Conditions?

We need to nail this, so a detailed answer seems called for.

First, Japanese does not use articles. There is no formal difference between "a championship" and "the championship", or for that matter between "championships" and "the championships". The word for world (世界) is not inherently deictic in Japanese and as an adjective is routinely used to mean "international". Reference to the best Japanese-English dictionary, Kenkyusha, for example, will present you with two such meanings: "international; world" - in that order. Adverbially 世界的に means "internationally" (not "worldly" - so we can see there, too, that the overlap with English is far from uniform). 世界博覧会 is any "international exposition" or "world's fair". A 世界の問題 is an international issue, not the only problem in the world. It is true in this case that the word "world" has been borrowed from English as ワールド but that's no more than a common design tic. And of course the Japanese (like the Russians, Chinese and others) have major problems with English articles.

As has been expressly stated in at least almost all small-scale "world" (i.e. international) championships before when they have been set up, a significant part of the sponsor's aims has been to promote domestic go. Since the aim is to provide domestic players opportunities to play against the best foreign competition it is only natural to have more domestic players in the line-up. So natural in fact that the following self-styled "world" (i.e. international) tournaments for women (who need such extra support because they tend not to get invitations to the open events) have all had more domestic players than each foreign country invited:

Cuibao Cup: 15 Chinese + 1 from Singapore
Hungchang Cup: 10 Chinese out of 24
Yuanyang Cup: 6 Chinese out of 16 but the two representatives from USA and Europe were also Chinese (and no invitation for Rui Naiwei, BTW)
Dail Cup: 10 out of 24
Haojue Cup: 6 Chinese out of 16
Bohae Cup: 6 out of 16

It is not possible to make a similar listing for Korean events because they have traditionally preferred international team events, but the principle is not unknown there. The Tong Yang Securities Cup began with a "world" name but just a token foreign presence. Although only men were involved, this too was at a time when the Koreans were making strenuous efforts to catch up with the rest of the go world.

The Senko Cup appears to have a bigger preponderance of domestic players, but two points can be made. One is simple arithmetic. If you have only eight players and four foreign nations to satisfy equally, you can only go with 4 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. Similar arithmetic explains the 6/16 and 10/24 patterns. Limiting the field to 8 is not sinister. Senko Group Holdings have had a policy of building up slowly. They began sponsoring a go festival in Higashiomi (ninja country!) a dozen years ago, and a highlight has always been the contingent of female pros invited for exhibition games, etc. A couple of years ago it expanded to a domestic tournament for female pros. I have mentioned elsewhere the current popularity of female go in Japan, and an ambitious sponsor like Senko can hardly be blamed for riding the wave. Now they have stepped up onto the world stage. Decent support, not niggling criticism, might encourage them to expand further in future.

The second point is that one of the domestic players, Xie Yimin, is actually from Taiwan and another, Nyu Eiko, has a Chinese connection (she is the niece of Michael Redmond's Chinese wife). So it may be domestic but it's hardly nationalistic.

We can all probably agree that the foreign players are stronger here (that, after all, is the point of the competition) and the gap between 1st prize and the rest is unusually large. So the sponsor is implicitly accepting that the bulk of its funds will leave the country. That doesn't seem very nationalistic, either.

So, on various counts we can conclude that the Senko sponsors are not being any more nationalistic or "naughty" than previous sponsors in other countries. Indeed, in my opinion, their actions, like those of previous sponsors, are nothing but prudent and praiseworthy.

That is not to deny that there have been and still are nationalistic problems in go, especially among fans. Korea-Japan relations have at times been tempestuous, Korean fans have been very cruel to a Chinese female pro, and the behaviour of fans when the TV Asia Championship was last in Tokyo truly was heinous. But those passions of fandom ought not to be stoked further by mistranslating a simple word and second-guessing a sponsor's stated motives.

Well I do think that the choices of "World Go Women´s Championship" and "World Go Championship" deserve a certain amount of tittering. Frankly speaking though, if there is anything to get uptight about, then it ought to be the monstrous pink website. Almost as irksome is the choice of photographs on the profile pictures. All the participants are pictured with their faces angled downwards in contemplation, what kind of subliminal message does that send out regarding the liberty of women? No wonder Ken Dodd died.

_________________
North Lecale

If I'm correct, The LG cup is informally called the 'LG Cup' but officially 'LG World Go Championship' or similar. So is removing 'Cup' from the official name and keeping 'Senko Cup' informally, more normal?

_________________
On Go proverbs:
"A fine Gotation is a diamond in the hand of a dan of wit and a pebble in the hand of a kyu" —Joseph Raux misquoted.

See similar discussion on "World Go Championship" thread (which is starting on 17th March, the day after this women's one finishes): forum/viewtopic.php?p=227737#p227737

It's amazing that my small post managed to draw such a strong reaction from John. I normally would not bother engaging in an argument. But since I was portrayed as a 'naughty' member of this community, I feel it necessary to tell my side of story.

- I took the hassle to write the original post to introduce a brand new tournament to Go fans here, something I have been doing for years. I wanted to share my expertise and knowledge in Go - that was my intention and nothing else. Using your own words, John, please do not do 'second-guessing' or speculating my 'motives'.

- I intentionally had a second post to express a personal opinion that I don't like the way the tournament is set up, separating it from the main post conveying (hopefully useful) information. People are entitled to have different views, aren't they? What's the purpose of a forum?

- There's no 'mistranslating' in my part. 'SENKO CUP World Go Women´s Championship 2018' was taken directly from the event's website. Not all readers here are linguists or know the intricacy of Japanese language - they are more likely to take the literal meaning of the tournament name, and later be disappointed to learn what the tournament actually is.

- "against the Terms and Conditions" just because one saying "the Japanese sponsors" as opposed to "the sponsors"? And being 'nationalistic'? I am afraid that I cannot see the logic here. I don't put those big labels easily on other people and certainly don't expect to be on the receiving end.

- Some of the tournaments listed in John's post are actually Korean tournaments (Bohae & Hungchang Cup) and therefore irrelevant to this discussion. So even a Go expert like John does make mistakes. Is that a big deal? No - it's merely a forum post, not an academic paper. So why a different view on a tournament cannot be tolerated?

- The cornerstone of Chinese culture has values like 'moderate', 'mutual interest', and 'harmony' in it. In my opinion, these values are frequently well reflected in the way many China-sponsored international tournaments are set up. Of course sponsors do give their own players some favorable treatments. Using John's statistics (which I haven't got time to verify), 6 out of 16 or 10 out of 24 places for the hosting country certainly looks pretty reasonable to me, not too excessively biased. And may I add that during 1990's when most of those tournament were held, China had the largest pool of strong female players.

- On the other hand, no matter how facts are twisted and presented, one cannot deny that 10 out of 12 world's strongest female players (according to GoRatings) are excluded from this so-called 'World Go Championship'. Fair or not, it is everyone's own judgement.

- Talking about family connection, I don't understand why Nyu Eiko was introduced as 'the niece of Michael Redmond's Chinese wife', not more directly Niu Lili's daughter. Niu Lili, being a very strong pro player back in 1980's and later a personal assistant of Go Seigen, is surely famous enough in her own right. See, people do inadvertently see things from a slightly biased perspective.

- Since prize money was mentioned in John's post, I'd like to give some facts here: in a recent team tournament, Tiantaishan Cup, prize money was split 30:15:10:5 among four teams; prevously in Huading Cup, prize money was split 20:10:5:5. So even the weakest team could share a significant portion of the cake. May I conclude that Chinese sponsors have mostly been generous to participants from all other countries? You may or may not agree, whichever side you take I won't call you 'nationalistic'.

PS It's very sad that after a long day's work I had to spend my night writing this to defend my view, or indeed my right to have a different view. I'd much prefer to spend my night compiling few more games for Go fans here, like I always do in the past 16 year.

Uberdude, if there is a next time, you don't have to count manually. I have post-processed the data of GoRatings and you can find the information you are after in this page: https://www.go4go.net/go/players/rank/999 (maybe I should find time to add those few missing photos).

Semi-final results:
Yu Zhiying beat Choi Jung by resign
Hei Jiajia beat Fujisawa Rina by 1.5

A bit late, but all these games are online now:

https://www.go4go.net/go/tournaments/news/212

I like the fact that in the YouTube stream the commentry seems to switch between boards (I mentioned commentating pairs commenting multiple games at once right before I saw this (scared) , as I think it may help to avert the "mickey mouse apocalypse"). Do the majority of commentaries go this way or is it a more recent practice?

_________________
On Go proverbs:
"A fine Gotation is a diamond in the hand of a dan of wit and a pebble in the hand of a kyu" —Joseph Raux misquoted.

According to Wbaduk Yu won the final on time after a cut in the centre on move 124. Unless Hei was ready to resign anyway (it is a troublesome cut, but obviously coming) that seems a silly way to end a final (worth £47k). And Choi won by resign.

Final standings:
1. Yu Zhiying
2. Hei Jiajia
3. Choi Jung
4. Fujisawa Rina

I just change the original title of the post from 'Senko Cup' to 'Senko Cup (international)' because I notice that the domestic version of it is still ongoing (preliminary tournaments are being played).

So I was incorrect to suggest this being a 'replacement'.

See also aeb/ISenko.

The second edition of this tournament is due to start on 22nd February.

There are eight players:

Mannami Nao, Tsukuda Akiko, Ueno Asami, Nyu Eiko
Choi Jeong
Yu Zhiying
Hei Jiajia
Natalia Kovaleva

I just realise that the Japanese representatives are the top 4 players from the domestic Senko tournament. Stronger players like Xie Yimin and Fujisawa Rina were out in early rounds of that tournament.