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copied from the Ama vs Pro page on 27 June 2007
tapir: In the Open Internet World Rapid Championship (IGS) 3rd round are several amateur wins against professionals as well, in all the open tournaments might be some amateurs winning. in the qualifiers for the various World Championships as well... However this page seems to be obsessed with "western" amateurs winning against so called "oriental" professional players. Isn't it?
Velobici: The page focuses on amateurs from non go playing countries winning, when playing even, against professionals from those countries that have national professional go players associations. The page ends up discussing Oriental professionals vs Occidential amateurs, but that is an artifact of where go was created/developed. Should a Western amateur win against Michael Redmond 9p, it would be mentioned here as well. Futhermore, at one time Jie Li studied weiqi in China reaching 1p strength five years before coming to the United States.
tapir: So we count Cho Seok-Bin, Ji Lie and the various ex-insei as "western" amateurs and Catalin Taranu or Alexandr Dinerchtein as "oriental" professionals since they are japanese and korean professionals respectively, right?
Velobici: The only professional player that I am aware of are ones certified by Oriental associations. As a result one may reasonably claim that all professionals are Oriental professionals. Similarly one may claim that all long term residents of the Occident are Occidentals.
There are several possible definitions for Oriental and Occidental: location based, culture based, language (as used by the individual in question) based, or DNA based. Which one(s) do you wish to use ?
pwaldron: As the person who put the page together, let me make a few comments. This page was meant as a response to one of the many discussions about amateurs vs. pros and someone looking for information about whether amateurs ever beat pros.
In order to qualify for the list, the pro player simply had to have been certified by a professional go association (i.e. the ones in Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan). The amateur had to not have a pro certification. As a consequence a number of older or out-of-practice pros make the list.
To qualify for a '*' (placed next to the date), a game had to involve a professional go player who was active in professional tournaments at the time the game was played. This indicated that the win was, in some sense, over a pro who was presumably not suffering from lack of competition by living away from the Asian go community. Therefore, people like Catalin Taranu 5p, who was active in Japanese tournaments at the time of some of the wins qualify for the '*', while Feng Yun 9p, who has been away from competition, didn't.
The bias of Western amateurs vs. Asian pros is a double consequence of the fact that pros are by definition certified by Asian go associations and the information that I had access to was largely based on Western tournaments. There are references, however, to the Internet blitz event, as well as the Agon Cup, since these were covered on gobase. Even in Asia, there are not that many tournaments where amateurs compete directly with professionals in serious games, although there are certainly a number of strong players that just never turned pro.
The page just seems to be obsessed with these "western" amateurs. So following games of the 3rd round in the IGS Rapid Go Championship may qualify as well... However I'm not sure who is who behind the nicknames:
And there will be a lot more whereever pros play against amateurs regularly. However, pros tend to be stronger than amateurs, winning more of their games. And most tournaments covered tend to be pro tournaments and even if they are less than 1000, these professionals play Go all the day long... So it might be hard to find a lot of amateurs winning against pros. But I don't see the point in claiming it never happens. Or nearly never happens.