gowan wrote:What's needed is support and competition with players at pro level.
I think the Koreans are providing the competition; from what I understand North American pros will be allowed to compete in Korean tournaments. Now realistically they'll get clobbered in the early rounds, but that doesn't bother me. Everyone has to start at the bottom and to expect next year's Meijin to be US born is a little much.
The bit I can't get my head around yet is how these players will support themselves financially. I assume that players could earn a moderate living by giving lessons, which the credibility of a pro diploma is bound to help. Lessons are inherently an individual thing, though, and is limited by the available time from the teacher. Clearly an additional stream of income will be necessary.
Westerners keep talking about needing "sponsorship" for tournaments. I think that's true, but when I look at the problem I keep thinking that it's the wrong vocabulary. While the recipient views money as sponsorship, the sponsor looks at it as advertising and so we have to ask how to make the go community attractive to advertisers. Part of that will be numbers, of course, but it will have to be more than that.
I think go media will be just as important, however, and there doesn't seem to have been a lot of movement on that in quite a while. Twenty years ago the only way for Westerners to access go was through a go club or paper book. A little under ten years ago people started broadcasting championship games online, and slightly more recently there was simultaneous transcription of pro commentary into these broadcasts. Eurogotv streamed live broadcasts, but none of these have turned into viable income streams.
To me it feels like the next major advance in Western go is not going to be the creation of a pro system, it will be leveraging some form of media to generate a domestic income stream. I think that will be the big thing that these new pros will have to work on if they want to secure a livelihood for themselves.
