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Yamashita Keigo, who also ows the most prestigious Japanese Go Title, Kisei, took the lead again in his defense of the Oza title: he leads Imamura Toshiya by 2-1 after today’s win, and he is only one game away from winning this title match.

White (Yamashita) managed a very clean and sharp cut at move 80, in a textbook style. Imamura must have been very sad to see his position split into two groups in such a painful way. It was all due to a very skillful series of three forcing / peeping moves by Yamashita. Check out the game record for details.

Next game is in two days, on November 29th.

“Old lion still has teeth”: Cho Chikun Judan won the playoff against Cho U to earn the right to challenge Yamashita Keigo for his Kisei title, according to Go Topics.

It will be a very interesting match: Cho Chikun has already defeated Yamashita earlier this year, in his defense of the Judan title.

Let’s see how Yamashita Kisei will defend his title against Cho.

Cho Chikun seems to be the only representative of the old Kitani school which can still win titles nowadays, not giving up to the new generation of players in Japan.

Go, Cho Sensei!

The title holder, Takao Shinji, kept alive his chances to defend the Mejin Title this year: he won today’s game by 2 and a half points, after what looked to me like a very good game for Black.

Takao won the first game of the series, but then Cho U won 3 in a row: one more loss for Takao and he is losing the title.

The score is now 3-2 for Cho U.

Cho U is just one step from winning Meijin Title: he won the 4th game by forcing a resignation in 141 moves.

Cho U won the 3rd game of this year’s Meijin Title by 1.5 points.

White (Cho U) played symmetrically for a little while - that must have put some pressure on Takao.

Cho U, playing black, won by resignation in the second game of the Meijin Title, so the score is now 1-1.

There were two very interesting exchanges in the two corners on the lower side in the first 70 moves.

I wrote a new lesson: “Learning from professional games (1)”.

This is based on first game from the current Meijin title in Japan.

This is not the first time I write something based on what I learn from replaying professional games - actually several of the professional titles I followed and wrote about contain such things - but I thought about writing separate articles instead of embedding the lessons within the actual tournament page.

For people who will read this a few months from now, following the tournament pages might not be attractive anymore (after all, there are a lot of tournaments, and mostly the new ones are followed).

Also, another news related to this latest lesson: I’m experimenting with adding Javascript to my pages. If you have Javascript enabled in your internet browser (most of the people do, especially those who use Gmail, Google maps, etc) the article will seem very short when you load (or reload) the page, and you’ll see a link at the bottom of the page along the lines of “Click here for the solution” - click there and the article will expand itself. (If you don’t have Javascript enabled, you’ll see all the article at once, same as before).

This is in order to avoid spoiling the problems by unintentionally showing the solution diagrams to those of my readers who like to really think hard about the problems before reading the solutions. Which I hope most of my readers do

Let me know if this is a good idea or not - if it is annoying to most of you I’ll just think of something else.

I added a (small) new feature on 361points.com: the possibility to replay a random professional Go game. While I like the idea of randomness, I am not so sure this is tremendously useful, after all there are many other ways to replay random pro games - honestly I did it more as a programming exercise.

The actual pool of game records is composed of relative recent games (year 2000 and newer) that are freely available on the internet - mostly from the great Go Topics website.

This feature is hosted on the main entry page for two reasons:

1. I don’t know where else to put it

2. For people new to Go that come to my site, it would be nice to actually see at a glance what a game looks like.

Let me know what you think.

Takao Shinji defended the Honinbo title.

The challenger, Yoda Norimoto, only managed to win one out of 5 games.
Again, just like earlier this year in the Kisei title, the younger player defeated the more senior player.

All game records are on the Honinbo title page.

Alexander Dinerchtein generously offered some of his game commentaries from the very recent WAGC.

He commented the following games: China vs. Netherlands, Japan vs. Czech Republic and Romania vs. South Africa.

You can visit Alexander’s web page at: http://breakfast.go4go.net/.