Life In 19x19

Some highlights from the Japanese 2024 tournament earnings table:

1. Ichiriki was in first place with 121,814,066 yen (US$814,000)

2. Iyama was 2nd with 57,449,414 yen

3. Top lady (in 4th place overall) was Fujisawa Rina with 35,187,216 yen

4. Ueno Asami was 5th with 20,390,526

5. Sister Ueno Risa was 10th with 9,7770,000 yen but has exceeded that already this year with her winnings in the 7th Senko International.

6. Even though his name rarely comes up nowadays, Yamashita Keigo was in 7th place with 13,423,000 yen (US$ 89,700).

What does the 7th highest placed person in a typical company get?

Perhaps connected with these low numbers, the Nihon Ki-in's "Kido web" new site will no longer be updated after 31 March 2025 because subscriber numbers did not reach the desired mark.

This reminds me of a paper I read in grad school, which discussed how compensating people based on tournament results incentivizes performance. They evaluate golf scores in professional tournaments, which have a similar drop-off in prize money as go tournaments. Paper is here:

https://ecommons.cornell.edu/server/api ... 41/content

I don't think the "What does the 7th highest placed person in a typical company get?" question is relevant, mainly because most people don't view their jobs as being in competition with their colleagues. There are exceptions, of course.

mhlepore wrote:... golf ... similar drop-off in prize money...

I'll be very amused if LIV Go takes off!

mhlepore wrote:https://ecommons.cornell.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/bfb68968-21a2-40bb-b77a-6a40a6670041/content

My goodness, so many things wrong with that line of argument! I'm reminded of "Baumol's cost disease", which only illustrates Prof. Baumol's lack of knowledge of the classical music world. But we're getting off topic here.

mhlepore wrote:I don't think the "What does the 7th highest placed person in a typical company get?" question is relevant, mainly because most people don't view their jobs as being in competition with their colleagues.

I interpreted the question differently: how can go survive as a profession if only a handful of elite performers can get the same money that many thousands of people in the corporate world receive with much less effort or skill?

Surprised Yamashita is doing better than Shibano. No one is surprised that Ichiriki and Iyama are #1 and #2, but I would have guessed those two play Shibano more often than anyone else besides each other.

jts wrote:Surprised Yamashita is doing better than Shibano. No one is surprised that Ichiriki and Iyama are #1 and #2, but I would have guessed those two play Shibano more often than anyone else besides each other.

My guess is that Shibano was 3rd in the overall ranking.

Ah yes, I see now that I misread John's bullet points as a rank ordering

To put the earnings in perspective, here are the top ten in earnings on the Japanese pro golf circuit in 2024. These are from https://www.jgto.org/en/stats/tour/mone ... ?year=2024. The tenth-ranked person is earning more than in Go, indicating a deeper overall money pool perhaps. However, the figures at the top are comparable.

ez4u wrote: Mon Apr 14, 2025 8:11 pm However, the figures at the top are comparable.

The #1 players in go and in golf are comparable.
But #2 in go is below #10 in golf. There is a big difference in go between the top of the top and everybody else, while in golf, if you do better on the field you do better in the bank. But not so much.

That Japanese golf scoreboard has the top 20 competitors each participating in about ~20 tournaments, and 14 of them appear to have won at least 1 tournament outright. So it's not the case (as I think you're implying, Pajaro?) that golf rewards 2nd place, 3rd place, etc. more generously than Go; the if I'm understand the chart correctly, the big prizes for 1st place are split among a larger number of players. (And also, there appears to be at least one Japanese golf tournament whose first prize is worth as much as 2-4 Go tournaments.)

It is not that golf rewards better the 2nd player, 3rd player and so on. It is that, overall, there is more money in golf than in go. Big surprise.
The #1 players are making more or less the same. Not because the prizes are the same, but because the best player in go won a lot more tournaments than the best player in golf. Also, there are more tournaments. Golf is more popular and also the structure of the competition is different.

In short, what I meant, is that we can't compare the earnings in go and in golf.

pajaro wrote: Wed Mar 25, 2026 1:04 am ...
In short, what I meant, is that we can't compare the earnings in go and in golf.

Uh... I think you just did a great job of exactly that!

By "compare" I meant "put in equal terms".
This might be a mistake in my English, as in my mother tongue (Spanish), I would have used this expression to say, well, what I was trying to say.

It's used in both ways in English, ez4u is being slightly silly