Top Amateur Players By Country / Discussion

Velobici: I do not understand the list for the United States. It is missing several very strong players: Jie Li, Zhaonian Chen (arwen and darkmage on KGS, undefeated winner of the 2005 Maryland Open) , Yuan Zhou and others.

IanDavisProbably best to edit it then. It seems a bit of a list for lists sake to me

Steve Kroon The list is still being written - basically at this stage it only includes the last 5 representatives to the WAGC and Michael Redmond. I'm not from America, and don't follow the Go scene too much there, so if you know more, by all means, add it.

  • Then you should add that disclaimer at the top of the list DrStraw
  • Steve Kroon Done - sorry I didn't do it earlier.

Velobici: Perhaps we should change the list to be a list of amateurs as the professionals belong to one of the national go associations. While Michael Redmond was born in the United States, he has not spend much time there since becoming a professional as his duties require him to be in Japan. Mingjiu Jiang is frequently in China. The distance and travel time to the Asian go countries is just too great of an active playing professional to reside in the United States.
The omission of China (both Mainland and Taiwan), Japan, Korea (both North and South) is strange.

  • Steve Kroon: I just hadn't entered the WAGC reps for the Asian countries yet. I think restricting the list to amateurs is a good idea - for non-Oriental countries with professionals, we can create a link to a separate page.

Dieter: At least for Belgium the page does not correspond to the EGF ratings. This kind of page is impossible to maintain.

  • Steve Kroon The page isn't supposed to be an up to date ordered list of players in each country by their EGF ratings. Most countries award ranks - these don't change that often, and I think it should be quite possible to maintain that. My info is so far totally limited to the WAGC participants - I hope to add info from the EGF and AGA ratings soon.
  • Rafael I sort of agree with Dieter.

unkx80: I think, occasionally a WAGC representative for a particular year may not be the strongest player for that country. It is quite possible that the country has only a very limited pool of strong players and for some reason, all of these players were not available for that year, so that country entered a weaker player.

  • Steve Kroon Quite possible - but I don't know the circumstances. I anyway think anyone who was available to play for a country at the WAGC should be on this list if possible, since it may show that a country may have strong players, but the strength isn't too deep.
  • Rafael What unkx80 says is more or less true of Brazil. I removed the weaker players from the list, but currently I don't really know who are the top players. Should the list include residents or only nationals?

tderz The problem of excluding pros from strongest players lists.

It is easier to have one list displaying the strongest players in their simple rating order. Indicate the pros as such.
Everyone can look for the strongest "amateur" on this list.
Give (one only) exact definition what pro means on the same site (having had professional training? - in Asia only?, - listed as professional - still?, having no other profession than playing/teaching Go? - now? or during their whole life? => all of these will end up in wishy washy lists).

Solve the problem for cases when pros have been participating in amateur tournaments and the ratings where used for calculating other amateurs ratings (and that of the pros), but then the suggestion above - excluding pros - wants to suppress their names.

Velobici: Suppress the names of professionals ? Hmmm...seems a strange idea, when we have pages for Cho Chikun, Kobayashi Koichi, Yang Yilun, Gu Li...enough examples. To have a single strength ordered list of amateurs per country is hard e nough, due the folks changing strength. To expand this to include professionals would either eliminate the amateurs from the list or require quite long lists for China, Japan, and Korean. Perhaps it would be best to limit the list to the 10 (arbitrary number) strongest amateurs in each country. Even in the United States, combining professionals and amateurs on a limited length list might eliminate all the amateurs: Michael Redmond, Yang Yilun, Jiang Mingjiu, Feng Yun, James Kerwin, Janice Kim, Jimmy Cha, Huang Liping, Xiong, Yupei?...thats 9 of the top of my head.

tderz: 1) "Suppress the names of professionals ? Hmmm...seems a strange idea, (...)" indeed I agree here as my bold header above indicated. (Was there a misunderstanding? No one wants to eliminate pages of Senseis)
However you seem to be in favour of suppressing the names of strongest players in a given country from that list if they are/were professionals (because the list would get too long).
My suggestion for the alleged problem would be:

  • make the list longer for stronger Go countries
    • if a country (e.g. the USA) hosts many (n) strong professionals and the remaining field is strong and dense too, show that!

Velobici: NOT suppressing...rather I am advocating TWO LISTS. One for Professionals. One for Amateurs.

It is so arbitrary to exclude several players from the list. 2) ... single strength ordered list of amateurs per country ... perhaps updated by themselves (pride) or rating list linking (easy & always up-to-date)
3) Those countries with a lot of professional players (JP, KR, CN) ... I see your point and agree. Despite that the US has a professional players association (I think), I do not think that it is comparable in size and fits in that list.

unkx80: I am actually a bit surprised that the English speaking Go community adopts a rather blurry definition of what is a professional, if the contents of the professional page is taken as definitive. I believe that the Chinese use a very clear-cut definition of what is a professional, at least for present players, that is, people who passed the professional exam. Of course, players who are have not passed the professional exam are entitled to teach, but we hardly ever call them professionals, rather, we refer to them as teachers or coaches.

By the way, I would support velobici here... think of what is the spirit of WAGC at the first place? ;)

IanDavis Guo Juan may not play in Pro Tournaments but she certainly teaches professionally and uses her 5p rank on KGS for instance. I vote for taking her off the list.

Bob McGuigan: To further muddy the waters I'll ask what should be done about players who were active professionals but have retired from professional play? For example, the late great 9-time Honinbo Takagawa, when he retired said he was looking forward to being an amateur. I think that the Chinese professional player association requires its members to play in ranking tournaments on a regular basis to preserve their professional status. What should be done with a (former) Chinese pro who resides in a foreign country and does not participate in Chinese tournaments? Professional status is not defined by playing strength or by whether a player earns his/her living from go. The only effective definition seems to be whether a player is an active member of a professional player association. I vote for keeping "professional players on the list. Of course that makes the list unmanageably large for the countries with professional associations, but it would be that anyhow if only "amateurs" are allowed.

Velobici: Professional players are those that have credentials from a professional players organization....until that organization yanks yer card, yer a pro. Kinda like yer a liar^H^H^Hawyer, until yer disbarred.


Migeru I formatted the names of Spanish players to the best of my knowledge. Here are some notes:

  • "Paco" is the short form of Francisco, but I have left it there because everyone (even internationally) knows Paco Garcia de la Banda as Paco, not Francisco.
  • Joan is Catalan for Juan. In less enlightened times it was common for Catalans to use the Spanish version of their names. Even if Joan Pons once entered the EGF database as Juan, everyone now knows him as Joan.
  • I have removed all hyphens because Spaniards usually hyphenate their names only to get around foreigners misinterpreting parts of our names or surnames as "middle names".
  • For the benefit of those of us with English keyboards, it would be really great if the wiki had a way to input accented characters. It is unfortunate that HTML character codes such as ñ or á don't work.

Top Amateur Players By Country / Discussion last edited by 50.23.115.116 on January 23, 2015 - 08:47
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