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Cho Hun-hyeon
    Keywords: People

Korean 9-dan professional. Born 10 March 1953. Perhaps the second strongest player in the world, after his former pupil Yi Ch'ang-ho. His name is commonly spelled Cho Hunhyun.

Two of his books are available in English:

His web-site (in Korean): [ext] http://www.chohunhyun.com


YY?: Cho's style has been known as "soft wind (breeze) and quick spear," poetically crafted by a Korean Go critic Park ChiMoon, while he once was affectionately nick-named as a "swallow" by his fellow players. The descriptions emphasize his graceful, light footed tendency that delivers a quick and often fatal thrust like a spear when attacking. It is somewhat comparable to Muhammad Ali's self-description of "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."

He is also known for his ability to "shake." As he detects inferior positions of his own, he tries to "shake" the outcome by engaging in ultra-aggressive, complicated moves, and he tries to psychologically "shake" the opponent. In this sense, "shaking" means an attempt or an ability to wage fierce, unpredictable, often very complicated, all out battles toward the end of a game.

In the era of Yi ChangHo, his style has changed to accentuate battles and tough in-fighting. Perhaps it was necessary to cope with Yi ChangHo's superior calculation and deep reading which are overbearing in usual positional exchanges and then the endgame.

As he was hopelessly outgunned by Yi by the mid 90's, the change in his style took place. His relative strength to Yi lies in his intuition and therefore quick reading for which he has been often called "the most talented player" by many Korean and Japanese players. The attempt to maximize his relative strength led him to creating fog of war situations wherein intution and quick reading often are more useful than calculation ability and deep reading. Then Cho can knock out Yi without having to go through the positional struggles and the much dreaded endgame of Yi's. In so doing, he has earned another nickname, "God of War", reflecting the change in style.

Cho HunHyun is notorious for "soliloquies" during the match. It is more or less murmuring to himself while reading, calculating, and contemplating a next move. The substance of his murmuring often is his own self-critique and the assessment or bantering regarding the trouble he is digging himself into. In a final match of a World Go competition, Yoda Norimoto even wore earplugs or earcovers while playing Cho -- Cho won the title over Yoda Norimoto.


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This is a copy of the living page "Cho Hun-hyeon" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2003 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.