Rank

PageType: Path   Difficulty: Beginner   Keywords: Culture & History, Go term

When you play Go in a competitive or club environment, you will in time receive a rank.

The competitive environment might be run by a national association, an international association, a Go server or a computer program.

You will start somewhere around 30 or 25 kyu and as your ability progresses, your rank will go up in steps to 1 kyu (Japanese term - in Korea gup). After that comes 1 dan, the first amateur 'expert' level; and eventually 7 dan, which is the highest generally-recognised rank for amateurs.

Rating systems

Discussion


CBlue: The beginner ranks are called 'class', while master ranks are called 'degree'. In Japanese, those are Kyu and Dan. In Korean, it's Gup and Dan, and in Chinese it's Ji and Duan. The internationally most commonly used terms are the japanese expressions. 'Kyu/Dan' ranking system is also used in martial arts such as Karate and Judo (black belts indicate dan ranks, while coloured belts indicate kyu ranks).

Kyu ranks usually start at 20 (beginner) or in systems of finer scale at 30, Gup and Ji ranks start at 18. The class ranks go up to 1, which is the strongest class rank. If the player further improves, he enters degrees and starts at 1d. Amateur degrees go up to 6d or 7d.

Professional players are measured in so-called Pro-Dan ranks, which are indicated by a 'p' instead of 'd'. Those go from 1p to 9p and are not as directly related to playing skill as the usual ranks, but players can get promoted for simply playing a large amount of games or winning a certain sum of prize money, depending on the country's Go Association. In order to become a professional, players have to take a very hard exam.

On KGS, beginners start at 30k (kyu), and amateur dan ranks are not limited to 7d but go up to 9d which allows a finer scale.

It is said that 1p corresponds to 6~7d amateur strength, but especially in Korea the competition between Inseis has become so hot that freshly graduated 1p players there are probably a lot stronger even.

To complete the translations, Go is actually called Igo in Japan, Weiqi in China and Badook (also written Baduk) in Korea.


This is a copy of the living page "Rank" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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