Why are young pros stronger than old pros?

[hyperpape]

Mef, could you elaborate? There are differences, but I'm not sure how you think they might matter. I can think of at least two possibilities, but am not sure if they're what you mean.

As I've understood it, most of the Japanese titles have a challenger who comes out of a league, and to get into that league you need to have done well in the lower level league the year prior...and to get into that league you need to have done well in an earlier league, etc....basically, a new pro has no mechanism for winning the title until they've been in the system for several years.

One the other hand, many of the Chinese and Korean challengers are decided by a knockout tournament with seeding. So while a new player may have a much harder road (with several extra games) there is at least a theoretical path to a title in any given year that they are in the qualifier.

Yes, I think that this can reduce the chances of young players winning titles, though I'm not sure what the timeline about going through the preliminaries is for Japanese tournaments. For the Gosei/Judan/Oza/Tengen, you go from a last preliminary tournament to the main tournament in the same year (this year's Oza had 34 players in the last preliminary), so that's not as restrictive, but the Kisei/Honinbo/Meijin leagues do give you a pretty steep slope to climb to reach the league and then challenge.

However, the point about older players hanging on longer in Japan isn't just about titles, it's also that in terms of strength as measured by the ratings and head to head matches, the older players are hanging on longer.

[listens]

The way that players learn has changed a lot. Professionals now play online a lot. They also study in groups much more than in the past. And study materials such as game records and problems are very accessible to Asian pros/insei. The end result is that studying is probably a lot more efficient than it used to be during the 20th century. I imagine that having many years of experience, despite some deterioration in the ability to read/concentrate, had more value in the past than today as a result: It took a lot longer to gain the same amount of knowledge compared to nowadays.

I have a feeling that the depth of talent going into the pro system has declined in Japan (having peaked around the 1960s-1980s probably). I suspect this may be one reason that older pros can still do well there; whereas the talent pool of Korean and especially Chinese pros has actually increased a lot in the 21st century, which makes older players even less competitive as a consequence: The older players' skills have declined, and the new pros are also that much stronger.