Archive for the ‘kobayashi koichi’ Category

Kisei Title - can Cho recover from 1-3?

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

The next Kisei Title game between Yamashita Keigo and Cho Chikun will be today. Yamashita leads Cho 3-1, which means that one more win will assure Yamashita of keeping his title again this year.

Will Cho be able to make a recovery from this uncomfortable score?

The Nihon Ki-in website published a table with the history of best-of-seven titles where one of the players recovered from 1-3 (or even from 0-3) to win the title.

Out of 10 such cases, Cho recovered 3 times from 0-3 to win the title: against Fujisawa Shuko in Kisei, 1983, against Otake Hideo in Meijin, 1984, and against Kobayashi Koichi in Honinbo, 1992. Cho also came back once from 1-3 to win the Honinbo title in 1990, also against Kobayashi Koichi.

Cho was also on the the other side of “miraculous comebacks” once: he led 3-0 against Rin Kaiho in Honinbo 1983 before losing the title 3-4.

So Cho Sensei is the master of comebacks. He is renowned for doing his best under pressure. I’m sure we’ll see an exciting game later today!

Posted in cho chikun, comeback, fujisawa shuko, kisei, kobayashi koichi, otake hideo, rin kaiho, yamashita keigo | No Comments »

Kisei title: Yamashita Keigo - Cho Chikun 1-0

Sunday, January 13th, 2008

Yamashita started his defense of the Kisei title well, by winning the first game (by resignation).

It may look like an upset win since Yamashita made a large dent in Cho’s territory while they seemed to start yose, but by following the Cyberoro pro comments (just the variations, since I cannot read the actual comments) I think Yamashita was ahead anyway and Cho tried to over-stretch in the yose stage by not defending properly against White 118, which led to the more spectacular ending.

Yamashita looks happy during the post-mortem game analysis with the main referee, Kobayashi Koichi, who was himself Kisei in the late 80’s - early 90’s for a record of 8 consecutive years (of which, interestingly, he both captured the title from Cho, then lost the title to Cho as well).

Posted in cho chikun, kisei, kobayashi koichi, title, yamashita keigo | 2 Comments »