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Comment by esturk | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know how strong FanHui is? I know Google ranks him as professional 2Dan but the rank may not mean the same thing as it is in China/Korea. I know he's the European Champion, but I've heard there is a large gap between the Asian professionals and their counterparts elsewhere. The ranking in general is also very skewed because it depends on the number of tournaments people win and which specific tournaments. Its a lot like Tennis where some tournaments have a rating of 1000, while others only have 500.

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So the thing is, there really are only Asian pros. (Having said that, here is a list[1] of Western pros). It's only in the last few years that the American Go Association could start certifying[2] Go players as pro. And to the best of my knowledge the European Go Association still does not have this power. Go, amazing game though it is, was relatively unknown outside CJK (China, Japan, Korea) until post-WW2. But globalisation has meant that the rest of the world is finally hearing about this beautiful game. So it migrates to the US via Japan (it's called iGo^ in Japan, which is why it is called Go in the West) and to Europe via Russia and the US. The US is a bit in advance of Europe but not by a huge amount. Arguably Eastern Europe is stronger than Western, as in Chess.

So basically Fan Hui[3] is 2p Chinese rank which makes him pretty solidly 2p. He's the three time European champion which should give you an idea of the strength of players in Europe. The top European players like Alexander Dinerchtein who is roughly the same strength as Fan Hui has an official 3p rank, Korean I believe. So Fan Hui is some ways off the top 9p players in CJK but he was convincingly beaten by AlphaGo so I'd be hesitant to try to infer its rank from this one performance …

   [1] http://learnbaduk.com/western-go-professionals.html
   [2] http://www.usgo.org/aga-professional-system
   [3] http://senseis.xmp.net/?FanHui

^ Baduk in Korea, Weiqi in China

There are european pro, which are kind of sponsored by a chinese company. (Fan Hui rank is a chinese professional rank however)

There is a big gap between Fan Hui and top Asian players.

But I think Demis is being very modest saying that the games were close.

He's a professional 2 Dan in the Chinese Weiqi (Go) Association (source: http://gobase.org/information/players/?pp=Fan%20Hui).

EGF and AGA have only just in the last couple of years started giving professional rankings, so most professionals in Europe and the US still have their professional rankings from China, Japan, or Korea, rather than European and American associations.

He is 2p in China, so his rank is actually chinese. In Europe (EGF) he plays as 7d. An oddball rank would be 2-3p in China, 3-5 or so in Japan and maybe 2 in Korea. But just guessing, I'm to far to properly compare, the only gauge is when he plays other "non-EU pros" in the EGC.

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