- I would bet if you took two equally matched professionals and offered one pro 3 extra points to have his/her clock cut in half relative to the other player, that pro would deny the request and keep his/her time.

I would bet A LOT against you here
I think a Japanese pro would give up 8 out of the 9 hours of thinking for 3 extra points in a top title match.

The discussion reminds me that the US Chess Championship experimented for a couple of years with a tiebreaker game where White got 45 minutes and Black got less time but draw odds (a drawn game counted as a win for Black). The players bid time amounts for the right to play Black; the player with the lower bid played Black and started with the amount of time bid. I believe that the winning bids were somewhere in the 20s, which surprised a lot of people for being so low.

Draw odds are enormous at that level, aren’t they?

But if you focus on Korea, many famous tournaments have recently disappeared and the number of events available for pros to play in has worsened, both quantitatively and qualitatively (and financially). If we try to assess Korean events in the round, we can see two patterns. One dominant one is that the time limits are overwhelmingly at the Mickey Mouse level. The other, less pronounced quantitatively but significant in terms of prestige, is that several Korean events are now hosted in Japan or China (even exhibition games!). Furthermore, several Korean stars now focus mainly on not just international events but on playing in China (mainly in the leagues). We have to wonder whether there is some cause and effect, and it seems legitimate also to wonder whether Korean go is being mismanaged.

As a downside, I would say the tournaments take too long (several months) to conclude.

I would bet A LOT against you here
I think a Japanese pro would give up 8 out of the 9 hours of thinking for 3 extra points in a top title match.

He refused to give his guess (he was grinning when he refused, clearly realizing that I was trying to pin him down. )

He also said that compared to main-time the difference in byo-yomi was clear and big. Sixty-second byo-yomi and thirty-second byo-yomi are very different [His emphasis]. This ties with my experience watching a lot of games from Japan's NHK Cup and Ryusei tournament. Many games involved players trying to gain time by making forcing moves as the count approaches 30 seconds only to have their opponents ignore them and completely change the flow of the game. This can be exciting TV but not good Go.

With Ing tournaments top pros pay 2 points to get an extra 20 minutes after hours of play. Maybe they just suck at time management and the alternative is losing on time rather than byo-yomi. However I'm sure Ke Jie would take 3 extra points to play with 1.5 hour versus his opponent's 3 as he's a fast player and sometimes only uses that much anyway.

Either way, it seems in a lot of these games that perturbations in komi may not matter that much.

Incidentally, this interview revealed that Cho does bouldering as a hobby and as a way to keep fit for go. I hadn't come across this term before, despite doing a fair bit of rock-climbing in my youth. But since it apparently involves climbing without ropes or harnesses, I wonder if that tells us anything about whether Cho is a risk-taker.