The forum section of Go4Go.net has never been very successful. This is probably due to: (1) I did not promote it actively enough; (2) The system is a bit awkward to use. To tackle the second problem, I have recently upgraded the base system so that its functions match those best forum software on the Internet.

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A few days ago, I announced this new function on rec.games.go and it has attracted significant attentions. A few days after, the system appears to be running very smoothly. So I hope that more Go fans will come here and use it regularly.

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On August 3rd, Yamashita Keigo reaches his 600th professional wins by beating Yoda Norimoto in the league of the Meijin tournament. His career score is: 600 win, 1 draw, 215 loss. Although he is just one of the 47 Japanese player who has reached this milestone, he is the fastest one, spending only 13 years and 4 months after becoming professional. His winning percentage is 73.6%, a second best, only lower than Takao Shinji’s amazing 75.4% rate.

Yamashita Keigo was born in 1978, studied Go with Kikuchi Yasuro, the famous amateur player running a Go academy. He became professional in 1993.

This article introduces a brilliant tesuji. It was originally published in Chinese on weiqi.tom.com. The question is selected from a Japanese Oteai tournament back in 1943. The two players were Takagawa Kaku (Black) and Sekiyama Riichi, both former Japanese Honinbo titleholders.

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In a previous post, I mistakenly wrote that Cho U 9-dan has won less than 1o major titles, which was based on outdated information. Some of my readers immediately gave the correct title count — 13. Following is the latest statistics I translate from Nihon Kiin. As Cho U and another star player Yamashita Keigo both recently reach the final of the Japanese Gosei tournamtion, the data is given as a comparison of the two.

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On April 13th, Cho Chikun 9-dan defended his Judan title by beating challenger Yamashita Keigo 3-1. This was his 69th major title.

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While a couple of meetings to discuss the International Go Rule have been held, there is no sign of an unified international rule in the horizon. Apart from the ‘political’ issues, technical questions remain. One such question is: should sekis contribute to the total points? The answer in Japanese rule is simply ‘No’. This might result in dispute.

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As I reported in the News section of this site, one of the most interesting game of the latest Fujitsu Cup is the one between Cho Chikun 9-dan and Lee Sedol 9-dan.

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A 10000-year ko refers to a special ko position in which the player who initiates it needs a lot of ko threats to win it. One typical example is shown in Fig.1.

Fig.1: A 10000-year ko

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Back in 2003, Lee Sedol played a famous game in the Korean KAT Cup, in which he made use of an unsuccessful ladder kill to capture his opponent’s key stones. To refresh your mind, the game record is here:

This is so extraordinary that I do not expect to see anything like it any time soon. To my surprise, similar situation occured recently in a high-level amateur game, and it was even more exciting.

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