World No. 1 Yi Ch'ang-ho of Korea won the Tianyuan/Chunweon match for the fourth time out of four in September 2000, and once again blew away Chang Hao 9-dan. This was the annual match between the champions of Korea and China in tournaments modelled on the Japanese Tengen.
A typhoon struck the venue, the Korean holiday island of Cheju-do, on the day the Chinese contingent of Chang and two supporters arrived, 14 September, but if they were hoping for some symbolism they were to be sorely disappointed. Yi needed only two games out of the best-of-three, and was never in any trouble.
It seems that the Korean side did not expect Chang to give any trouble. They would have been more worried apparently if the challenger had been Zhou Heyang. Is this mind games going on?
Here are the two games in sgf format. Click to download.
The match is sponsored by the Sports Korea newspaper and the Shanghai-based Xinmin Wanbao evening paper, as well as the professional bodies of the respective countries. The winner's prize is $10,000, with $5,000 for the runner-up.
The two participants are the champions of Korea and China in a tournament whose title bears the same characters but is read differently in the two languages (the same as the Japanese Tengen). It is sometimes called the Korea-China Tengen, but to avoid injuring national pride we will call it by the names of the title in each language, giving priority to the Chinese Tianyuan as it is the older tournament.
The match is a best-of-three, games played at intervals of two days.
The rules of each game depend on who has Black. With Korean rules komi is 5.5 points, with Chinese it is 2.75.
Tianyuan, like the Korean Chunweon, is borrowed from the Japanese word Tengen (origin of Heaven) which, in its go sense of centre of the board, is attributed to the Imperial astronomer Shibukawa Shunkai (1639-1715; he was 7-dan in go).
