Here are a few comments jotted down from a conversation with Chinese pro Liu Yajie 2-dan during her visit to MSO4 in August 2000 with child prodigy Liao Xingwen. The comments were largely replies to questions Mindzine readers asked us to put.
Do professionals still study life and death?
Yajie was shocked at the question. Yes, of course! Even Ma Xiaochun does this daily. But what sort, and how? Ah, there was the difference with amateurs.
All Chinese pros have a copy of Igo Hatsuyoron (the superhard problems compiled by the Japanese Meijin Inseki,and partly published by Yutopian), and also a collection of similar hard problems that they pass around among each other. These are not normally composed problems, but uncertain positions taken from real games.
When I argued that it was surely not possible to keep studying Igo Hatsuyoron, because once you knew the answers that was it, Yajie said it was always possible to find new wrinkles in those problems, but in any case it was important to know not just the main solution, but all the variations including the near misses.
She added that that was the main difference between the way amateurs and pros studied problems. Amateurs were satisfied once they had found one solution, but a pro would not leave it until there were no uncertainties.
That was also the explanation of something about the play of Liao Xingwen I had queried. I had noticed that he looked intently at life and death positions then suddenly his eyes switched to another part of the board and he never looked at the L&D area again. That was because he had been trained that way, Yajie said. He was not allowed to leave a position until there were no uncertainties. She claimed all pros were like this and were pretty rigid in not going back to re-explore a position even if they had the time, as this was in fact part of their time management system.
Do pros work out all the endgame plays by counting the values of each play?
A shy admission here - in games against amateurs she tended to do it by feel, but in a game against another pro, all yose positions are calculated as far as possible.
Does she play against her husband, Wang Hongjun 7-dan?
No, he won't allow it, because playing against weaker players makes you weak. Yajie has had almost no opportunities to play even games herself (the last chance was in 1998) and constantly teaching amateurs has reduced her own strength considerably.
The reason for the lack of even games for Yajie is the dearth of women's events for women now in China. When China was trying to catch up with Japan, women players got lots of support, and Yajie benefited from that. She was, at the time, in the national training squad in the same pool as Rui Naiwei 9-dan. But there has been a long period of neglect, and only very recently have there been signs of renewed support.
If she was able to return to the tournament scene, how would she study to regain her full strength?
Two ways, she said: play over even games and try hard to find someone stronger to play against.
What other differences are there between amateurs and professionals?
Easy - all amateurs are far too aggressive, even when they think they are not. (I have heard other pros say the same thing, by the way.) Again a difference between Liao Xingwen (now strong amateur 4-dan at age 6) and adult amateurs is that he is not aggressive. If anything, she will need to impart a little aggression to his game.
I had a little insight into this myself in what was supposed to be a teaching game with Yajie later. Having heeded the remarks above, I made a big effort not to be aggressive. The game did erupt in turmoil, but I fondly thought that was because she was trying to mix things to overcome my steady play.
I was flabbergasted at the end (having lost,of course) when she said that I was so aggressive that she could only respond to my moves and therefore she could not create any situations that I could learn from. There's obviously much more to a teaching game than most of us realise.
Does Xingwen have the capacity to be world champion?
Most certainly. The hopes for the other two live-in pupils she and her husband have are much lower. One can certainly become a good pro and make a good living. The other one will make 1-dan an no more.
I was surprised by the latter statement, and asked why wasn't it best to tell him that and to stop wasting his time. Yajie said that his parents were well aware, but were so keen to see him achieve 1-dan that they had even allowed him a year off school to study more. The reason is that a professional 1-dan diploma is virtually a guaranteed entry ticket to an elite university in China.
Footnote:
After the MSO4 event, through the very kind offices of curator Graham Hutt of the British Library, I was able to take Yajie and Xingwen to see the original of the oldest extant go book in the world, the Dunhuang Go Manual - it is the ancient version of a paperback, a small roll of paper that fits into the pocket of a monk's robe, and had been copied by an unknown person for his own use over 1,000 years ago.
John Fairbairn, Liao Xingwen and Liu Yajie pore over the Dunhuang manual. (Photo courtesy of the British Library)
It is far from easy to read and even scholars have trouble with it, yet Yajie seemed to find this (and other old texts) fairly easy. When I asked why, she laughed and said she misspent her youth studying literature instead of go!
