Life In 19x19

Posted: **Wed Dec 11, 2013 11:38 am**

emeraldemon wrote:Judging by Uberdude's table it's the first year since 2006 that Lee Sedol hasn't won a tournament.

And even more remarkably, the first time in over two decades (since Lee Changho's first title in 1992) that a Korean hasn't won a title! So for once it's not exaggerating to talk about the end of an era.

Posted: **Thu Dec 12, 2013 1:30 am**

And when the two Chinese decades end the Western era will begin! harharhar :lol:

Posted: **Thu Dec 12, 2013 2:33 am**

Tang Weixing was apparently the world's first (and youngest) amateur 8-dan at age 12 when he won the Wanbao Cup. He may also be considered the first "private-sector" Chinese champion. He had been close to a full-time go student since age 7 when he father took him to Beijing to study in the prestigious Xingze school.

This is a private junior school in Beijing that incorporates go into the curriculum. Located in the Daxing district to the south of the municipal area, it has offered since 1997 a combination of 35 hours normal school tuition (Chinese, mathematics, computing) a week plus 20 hours of go tuition by strong professionals. It has already produced several of the country's corps of approximately professional 200 players. It caters for around 120 boarding pupils.

It is run by a proper teacher, Bao Chenghong, and is as well staffed as any English boarding school. It even has its own doctor. But what you will not find in Eton is the cadre of go teachers. The main one in Xingze is Luo Jianwen 7-dan, deputy head of the Chinese Weiqi Association. But he calls on many colleagues. Even Miyamoto Naoki, the recently deceased Japanese 9-dan, was once invited to lecture. Other teachers have included Luo Xihe 9-dan, Wu Xinyu 6-dan, Huang Yizhong 6-dan and Li Fan 3-dan.

The basic premise is that if you enter the school as amateur 1-dan, you will be 5-dan within three years. Children are warned that there is very little playtime. It's very expensive, too, with fees not just for tuition, but also for board, equipment and some other extras.

This put Tang's family in straitened circumstances but he was rescued by another element of the new private sector in China - the Chunlan company, which not only runs the Chunlan Cup but also the Chunlan Foundation.

Apart from his prowess on the board, young Tang appears to have the same sort of inner steel as the player he most admires, Go Seigen. When he appeared in the World Amateur,Pieter Mioch write this report for GoGoD:

"Today I had the honour of being the game recorder for two games of the Chinese representative and favourite for the title, the 13-year-old Tang Weixing.

The morning game, Round 5, was against the boy from Hong Kong, Chan Naisan, also 13. I was really looking forward to writing something like, "Off the board these two geniuses are just two plain boys such as you can find anywhere, playing soccer or Game Boy, but once they sit down to play a game of go they mature beyond description and resemble two wise old men bearing the weight of the world on their shoulders and being well equipped to do so."

"Well, errrr...

"Did that turn out to miss reality by a landslide or more?! Right from the start neither player limited the battle to the go board, trying to stare each other down, making belittling sounds or other suspicious comments. It even went as far as bumping their shoes under the table, trying to gain the most territory under as well as on the board."

In Tang's defence, he had been heavily criticised for not winning the Ing Youth Goe a little while earlier - Chinese players can be as envious as western players as to who gets the nice freebie trips. As it happens, he did not win the WAGC either, but he has bounced back to take a world title.

So now both Gu Li and Yi Se-tol have been defeated in the latest major international events. Does that take some of the shine off their ten-game match? Or does it just add to the suspicion that modern tournament go can be a bit of a crapshoot - too much of a good thing?

Posted: **Thu Dec 12, 2013 7:40 am**

Just eyeballing tournaments, I suspect that the teenagers' biggest advantage over Lee and Gu is their number. It would be nice to look at the various rankings that exist and see how they compare. Sadly, I don't read Chinese, Japanese or Korean, so it's a bit of a laborious process for me.

Posted: **Thu Dec 12, 2013 8:33 am**

I don't think Lee Sedol or Gu Li are dominating the tournament scene the way they were a few years ago, but no one has yet shown that they could replace them at the top I think. It's an interesting time in go, I'll be curious to see if players like Shi Yue, Chen Yaoye, and Tang Weixing can step up and win not just one big event, but several, threatening to take over the way Lee Sedol did for so many years (and Lee Changho before him, etc.)

Posted: **Thu Dec 12, 2013 10:31 am**

Yeah, I wouldn't bet much on any one of these young Chinese pros to become the new Lee Sedol, or even win more than just a few titles. But what might happen is China is able to churn out several dozen such pros over the next decade or two who, en masse, dominate the Go scene. When I saw Tang Weixing win at the 4th Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games (Blackie was a bit surprised, many favoured Tan Xiao) I thought "Oh, another strong young Chinese pro I've never heard of". Now he beat Lee Sedol in a world championship. How many more are there like him?

Posted: **Fri Dec 13, 2013 9:59 am**

Here's a modest translation from me of the game comment I found on tom weiqi. Enjoy !

Posted: **Fri Dec 13, 2013 11:32 am**

Awesome, clemi... Any chance they had commentary on game 1? :-)

Posted: **Sat Dec 14, 2013 10:01 am**

And here's the first game !

Posted: **Sat Dec 14, 2013 1:10 pm**

Thanks, clemi. You're awesome!

Posted: **Mon Dec 16, 2013 9:36 am**

I wrote something similar on the gogamegure forum but let me repeat it in another form:

Suppose top tennis would reduce matches to one set and further increase the number of tournaments, where grand slams would be indistinguishable from others, in terms of prize money and exposure, then I don't think we would see rivalries of the calibre we now have, first between Federer & Nadal and now Nadal & Djokovic.

So the 2014 jubango between Gu Li and Lee Sedol will be a very good thing. Even though we don't know if these two are still the best candidates for such an event, they are at least the two biggest names we have on the scene and may revive their best play in these fantastic conditions.

The advent of yet another new Chinese kid on the block may be the result of a better system at producing prodigies but it also shows the failure to have the best of them consistently prevail.

In other words: the way international matches are currently organized induce randomness into the results.

Life In 19x19

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