September 1995

September was a rotten month for professional go players named Kobayashi. To start with, on September 3 Kobayashi Satoru lost to Chang Hao in the China-Japan Supermatch series. After recovering from a bad opening, the Kisei / Gosei played what should have been the two winning moves in the wrong order, and eventually had to resign. Two days later Chang also beat Rin Kaiho by resignation, to extend his Supergo winning streak to a glittering five games. The Japanese team is down to its last man, Otake Hideo, who will face Chang in Beijing in November.

The weekend after the Supergo debacle, Kobayashi Satoru played Kato Masao for the ACOM cup. This game paired the two players who currently top the Japanese pro community in number of wins this year. As the winningest of the two, Satoru went into the match the favorite, but he came out the loser. Kato overpowered him to collect the cup and half a million yen.

The next week Kobayashi Chizu, Satoru's sister, played Nakazawa Ayako for the women's Kakusei title. Following wild fluctuations of the lead in this game, Nakazawa won by half a point. After a few years in the dark, she seems to have regained the form that made her women's Honinbo in 1990 and 1991.

In the meantime, Kobayashi Koichi had begun defending his Meijin title against the challenge of Takemiya Masaki. Interest centered on what these two would say about each other before the match started, but Takemiya, who once compared the Meijin to a subway, now praised his opponent as a "practical player who steadily gains points on you," and billed the match as a contest between "dream" and "reality." The score after two games is dream--2, reality--0. Both times, Takemiya won by half a point in the endgame, an area in which the Meijin Kobayashi was once considered preeminent.

In between those losses, the Meijin also lost his chance to challenge Cho Chikun for the Oza title. The challenger will be O Rissei, who has been doing extremely well against Cho recently. In his game with Kobayashi, O tested an opening strategy developed by Go Seigen. When Kobayashi used Black 5 to make a small knight's enclosure of the top right corner, O immediately played White 6 at the shoulder of Black 5. This move worked, and O won by a 1 1/2 points.

After Chizu also lost a game in the women's Meijin preliminaries, it began to look as if the Kobayashis might be under a collective curse, but Koichi and Satoru disproved that theory with two victories apiece toward the end of the month. Kobayashi Koichi defeated Chin Kaei (8 dan) and So Kofuku (7 dan) to stay in contention for the Tengen and Kisei challengers' berths. To earn either berth, however, he will have to get past Cho Chikun.

In other professional action, Mimura Tomoyasu (7 dan) has captured his second consecutive Shinjin-O title. He beat Cho Sonjin (8 dan) in two straight games in the play-off.

The women's Honinbo has been upgraded to a best-of-five match. First challenger under the new system will be a twenty-one-year-old shodan, Chinen Kaori, the pride of Okinawa. Chinen returned from an extended teaching tour in Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Hong Kong to beat out Ogawa Tomoko for the challenger's spot.

Internationally, on September 2 Japanese television viewers found out what their Korean counterparts had known for weeks: that the young Korean star Lee Changho had won the Asian TV Go Championship. His victory ended six years of Japanese mastery in this event. Lee defeated Kobayashi Satoru (Japan) in round one, Ma Xiaochun (China) in round two, and his own mentor Cho Hunhyun (Korea) in the final. The games were video-taped July 10-14 at the Sheraton Grande Tokyo Bay Hotel.

Back home in Seoul, Lee Changho played a special best-of-three match with Ryu Shikun on September 4-6. Lee and Ryu had been rivals in their apprentice days, before Ryu came to Japan. Lee won the first game of the renewed rivalry in typical style, by coming from behind in the endgame, then swept on to an easy victory in the second game. After that, the two players forgot their rivalry and went out together for a night on the town.

In amateur go, Hirata Hironori will take a shot at defending his world title next year. Hirata won his way through a tough two-day, six-round knockout to become Japan's 1996 WAGC contestant, defeating young and fast-rising Sakai Hideyuki by half a point in the finale. "Sakai should have won that game," said Hirata. "Considering my age, it would be safer to have him play."

In computer go, Chen Zhixing's Handtalk sailed undefeated through seven rounds in Tokyo on September 29-30 to win the first FOST (Fusion of Science and Technology) cup. Handtalk was also awarded a 5-kyu diploma, after beating a human opponent of about that strength by resignation in an even game. Second place went to Michael Reiss's Go 4++, while David Fotland's Many Faces of Go finished third. Those two programs received ratings of 7-kyu and 8-kyu, respectively. Japanese programs did not fare well, the best of them managing only three wins.