by Yuan Zhou
There’s a very important professional go event that western go players probably don’t know much about. Known in English as “The Chinese A League” and started in 1999, the annual format changes, but currently it consists of sixteen teams, each of which is associated with a particular city that is the home of the corporate sponsor of the team. Divided into two groups of eight teams each, they play each other twice in a round robin event that is extremely popular among Chinese go fans. The teams contain six pro players each, and teams in the stronger “A” league (there is also a “B” league) are allowed to add one foreign pro to their team (this is expensive, of course). Each encounter involves four games between the two teams so only four of the six play each time. Three of the games involve relatively long basic times, two hours each, but one game is fast play, one minute per move. This latter difference is to accommodate having one of the games in each meet shown on TV. After the round robin season, the two teams with the best records have a play-off to determine the ultimate winner, and the two with the worst records have a play-off to see which gets eliminated from the League.
This event means that Chinese pros are regularly involved in very high-level games during the year, which is made even more valuable by having top foreign pros involved. For example, in the most recent running of this event, the foreign players included Shin Jinseo 9p of Korea (known as “AI Shin” because of his devotion to studying the AI strategies and considered by many to be Number One in Korea), Shin Minjun 9p who is challenging for first place in Korea, Park Junghwan 9p of Korea, as well as Lee Donghoon 9p and Kim Jiseok 9p of Korea, and also Iyama Yuta 9p who holds the top titles in Japan, Ichiriki Ryo 9p of Japan who is challenging Iyama these days, and Shibano Toramaru 9p.
This extraordinary amount of high-level competition, combined with exclusive access to the best of the AI programs, Fine Arts, is probably the main reason Chinese pros are currently dominating the international go scene, winning most of the titles. If you look at the list of title holders on the go news web site mentioned below, you will see the overwhelming number are Chinese.
Because of the high level of expertise and the decent basic playing time, these Chinese A League games are some of the best in the world every year. I have provided commentaries of several of them over the years in the E-Journal. You can access reports of these games on the go news site gotoeveryone.k2ss.info/news, where some of the game records can also be downloaded.
Yuan Zhou is a popular teacher and longtime contributor to the E-Journal; find out more on his website.
