Yi Ch'ang-ho (35) is getting married in the autumn to a Cyberoro reporter, Yi To-yun. While that will make his mother very happy at last, the real question is what effect will it have on his results. Conventional wisdom is that wedding bells sound the death knell on go performance, though Yi Se-tol seemed to buck the trend.

But how can Yi Ch'ang-ho sustain his performance anyway? It is utterly staggering. Remember that for most of his career he has been pitted against a much higher proportion of elite players than the average Yi, yet (as of 14 June 2010) he stands at 1515 wins and 472 losses, or 76.25%. That is way above even Go Seigen (under 70%, though with a high proportion of handicap games).

The new Kido Yearbook has an interesting table of the career records of the top 50 players in Japan, and virtually none comes anywhere near Yi Ch'ang-ho. However, Cho U is an exception. He has 710 wins and 261 losses, for 73.12%. That's pretty remarkable, too.

Finally :3

Well maybe this will give him new energy and boost him once again to the top. I'm still a big fan of his and hope he'll be able to catch another title in the near future.

It's a bit of a taboo to marry someone of the same surname in the CJK countries, isn't it?

Or is that an old fashioned thing nowadays?

I think that it would be a bit impractical in Korea, with 19 million "Kim", 7 million "Yi", and 4 million "Park" (these three make up about half of the korean population, according to Wikipedia).

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A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

there isn't 3 millions ways of pronouncing Yi, and twice this number for writing it ?

Tryphon:

Not in Korea, it's not tonal like Japanese or Chinese, they don't use the 4 voices, and they have an alphabet

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

I thought that Japanese isn't tonal and Korean is... am I wrong?

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

Japanese may not be tonal, I might be wrong about that, for some reason I thought it was. Korean isn't though, Yi is written and pronounced the same (with regional variation of course)

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

Good to know. Could it be easy to learn so for a westerner ? (relatively to Japanese, or worse, chinese)

Huh, I guess we're both a bit off... "Some East Asian languages, such as Burmese, Korean, and Japanese have simpler tone systems, which are sometimes called 'register' or 'pitch accent' systems." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)

I figured it was tonal because I can't pronounce any of the words...

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

The US Foreign Service categorizes languages based on difficulty for native English speakers. Category III (Languages quite difficult for English speakers) includes: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Ararbic.

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I am Tartuffe from GoDiscussions.com

Probably only because of the graphemes used, not so much because of the pronunciation.

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

... the swedish are not amused....



EDIT: I know exactly one Swedish anecdote, my father tells a story about the Prussian General "Von Moltke" who is said to have laughed only twice in his lifetime,

Once, when he was at the front and he received word that his mother-in-law had died

and the second time when he was told that Stockholm was an impregnable fortress.

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

I thought Prussia was a part of (modern-day) Germany, not Sweden - am I confused? Or is that just a Swedish anecdote because it mentions Stockholm?

You are correct.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussia

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Does that mean we can finally see Yi look excited?

Note that the Scandinavian languages also use pitch accents, however.

It's not commonly known, but Yi has a single patch of skin which he uses to show emotion, the frequency with which this patch twitches changes dramatically between when he is subtly bemused (around once a day) and when he is vaguely not pleased (around twice a day).

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

Clearly a fake ! Shadows don't fit

It's a trap!

Run Choi! Run!

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Tactics yes, Tact no...