A Wider Field

Well, it has been quite some time since my last post! Between school, summer job applications, and my continued attempts at obtaining scholarship funds, I've fallen a little behind on both my go studies and this blog. In fact, I still have yet to post the specific book reviews that I had planned and promised. Unfortunately, that's not my subject today, and I'll have to make it up another time.

Today I would like to talk a little bit about Baduk. As I've played Igo more and more, and gotten a better sense of its history and culture, I've also come to be aware of a number of different fields of Igo. Past and present, Japanese, Chinese and Korean-- while it's still Igo, these 'Igo cultures' all have their own differences-- enough so that I'm starting to feel it's appropriate to identify whether you're talking about go, wieqi, or baduk, and not just because of the slight komi and scoring differences.

Up until now I've been influenced mostly by the more modern Japanese go scene. The books I read are written by Japanese pros, and the games I review are played by the same people. This is not so much because of a lack of chinese or korean texts, or even because of relative strength levels (of the three, it could be said that Japan is in a bit of a tight spot, in fact.) It's mostly just because I study Japanese.

Earlier today I was looking around for more random texts that might interest me, and stumbled across Cho Hye-yeon's Creative Life and Death (prescribed for a ranging of dan level players.) Cho Hye-yeon, of course, maintains her own english language blog, "Full of Surprises" (http://loveku.livejournal.com/) which I had run across from time to time. What I didn't know about her is that she was 8p, and one of Korea's strongest female baduk players (astounding in itself, as she also attends college full-time, and is fluent in several languages.) My interest was piqued, and I started to look around through her various posts. I found the following, on a certain opening to be particularly interesting, and would reccomend looking over it. (http://loveku.livejournal.com/2009/04/04/). Of the players listed on this page, Lee Sedol and Lee Chang Ho are both players whose game records I've occassionally run across, and both are highly esteemed players.

The Korean players that I've viewed have all been spectacular fighters, and are also fast-paced and flexible. Originally I felt affronted by the messy way they seemed to play, but what I've realized is that these are players that have guts that I can't fathom, and a beautifully expiremental nature. Because of this, I decided that I would really like to look into some more Korean baduk players to study in my free time.

Do you have a culture that you study from? What do you think about the different evolutions of the game of go?