Life In 19x19

What a happy coincidence!

Key for people who can't read Japanese/Chinese

I: Iyama Yuta (Japan) - Seeded player
II: Park Jeong-Hwan (Korea) - Seeded player
A: Wang Yuan Jyun (Chinese Taipei)
B: Yamashita Keigo (Japan)
C: Shin Jin Seo (Korea)
D: Ke Jie (China)

The best way to seed Iyama to the final...

Clear win for Yamashita Keigo
Ke Jie win but I don't know what's going on, bot estimation put Ke Jie lead but it's not set in the stone and Shin Jinseo timeout or resign?

Semifinals:
Park Junghwan vs Ke Jie. They need to read Get Strong at Nigiri: white has won 13 of their 14 games.
Iyama Yuta vs Yamashita Keigo.

pookpooi wrote:Clear win for Yamashita Keigo
Ke Jie win but I don't know what's going on, bot estimation put Ke Jie lead but it's not set in the stone and Shin Jinseo timeout or resign?

White's lead is less than 2 points - probably at their levels (and at 1 minute per move) this gap is too big too catch up.

Actually at first I question if it's morally wrong for Shin Jinseo to keep playing and rely on Ke Jie's mistake. But I noticed that it's actually Ke Jie that play fast and pressure Shin Jinseo to make even more mistake.

Here is the youtube video with Michael Redmond's commentary for the day 1 games - the link is to the point where the actual commentary starts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRDlb9b ... e&t=51m07s

With the recent discussion of seiza-or-not, here's a still of Yamashita sitting on his knees on a chair from the above video.

Yamashita is somewhat famous for keeping seiza through his matches. I think all members of his school do but he's been in a lot of two day matches, so it's hard.

Ahead of Yamashita's game with Iyama, I had a look at the head-to-head records. Iyama leads (on games in go4go) 41-20, with 4-1 in the last year. In fact tomorrow will be the 1-year anniversary of Yamashita's last win (in the 4th Championship of Tournament Winners, maybe Iyama didn't try so hard in that compared to big titles), can he repeat the feat? Some people may have wanted Ichiriki Ryo to be the 2nd Japanese player (as a young rising player, whereas Yamashita is probably past his peak, but won their game in qualifier final) and he is the #2 Japanese on goratings (#64 to Yamashita's #77), but I think Yamashita probably has better slim chances of beating Iyama. Ichiriki's lifetime head-to-head is a dismal 21-5, on a 13 game losing streak, but comparing that to Yamashita's is unfair as the latter is older than Iyama so could get more wins before Iyama was at his top strength. Nevertheless, Yamashita has more experience of playing long (4- or 8-hour, this event is 3-hour) games against Iyama and has won quite a few of them (not enough to win titles recently) which could give him some hope. Looking at their stats since 2016 (around when Iyama upped his dominance of Japanese Go and got all 7 titles) Yamahista is at 1-8, whilst Ichiriki is 1-15. Takao Shinji probably has one of the best with 6-11 (though his lifetime of 21-44 is very similar to similar-aged Yamashita).

I would have preferred Shibano tbh. Better yet, more Chinese and Korean players. Japan having 2 players and Iyama being seeded to the next round playing another Japanese player is a joke.

On Yi-ke server:

Since Yamashita get into second round I can say that he's not the wrong choice.

Lucas Baker (6d) is a surprised commentator today, since he's one of AlphaGo engineer he should provide AlphaGo winrate too!

...he should provide AlphaGo winrate too!

Alas, he probably doesn't have access, or isn't allowed to, or both...