ENTER THE DRAGON - CHANG HAO
CHANG HAO
Chang Hao is one of a famous crop of players born in the Year of the Dragon. Ma Xiaochun 9-dan and Zhou Heyang 8-dan are others. In China dragons don't get messed around by St. George or anybody else. Rather, they are associated with Heaven and the Emperors; they are used to being on top. The go varieties are certainly no strangers to that feeling. Chang Hao is currently well ensconced at the top of the Chinese rankings, and, be it noted, Millennium Year is a dragon year, too!
But the real truth is, the top Chinese players have got where they are through sheer hard work as well as talent. The competition is intense. In Japan, most children go through hell to compete for university places, and the go equivalents, the insei, face the same ferocious race.
But in the same way that Japanese university entrants are allowed to coast for a few years before they are thrown back into the similar inferno of a salaryman's life, insei who qualify to be professional 1-dan can also take a breather.
Life as a pro
In China it's not like that. Relax and you'd be swamped in the tidal wave of new talent. This difference between the two countries is also reflected in the way go is run. The Japanese pro normally plays one game then has a day or two, or three, off.
Chinese pros are more used to playing a solid week at a time, more like the western chess scene. Unless he's made it to a final, the Japanese pro plays most often in the same place, the Nihon Ki-in or one of its branches. The Chinese pro has a hectic life travelling round different venues in a huge country. He will also be trying hard to clock up airmiles too, because overseas is where the big bucks are.
The Japanese pro usually has a warm and cosy relationship with a teacher. He may well be the only pupil, and he will often live in the master's house. The young Chinese pro joins a national training squad with dozens of rivals just like him, and they all have to fight to survive. Japanese pros at least usually spend longer on their games, because most Chinese tournaments use time limits of only 3 hours each, but the faster pace just makes life more frantic.
This all produces players of a different temper. Chang is one of those tempered in the day-and-night blast furnaces of Chinese go. He was born in Shanghai on 7 November 1976. He learnt go when he was five.
First steps
Chang Hao first encountered go when his parents, both beginners, were playing over moves from a television series. After a while he announced "I want to learn how to play go" - so at least we are spared the usual story associated with Oriental prodigies who master the game just by watching adults play.
Even more realistically, his mother applied to the local leisure centre go school. That year's course had already begun so she was told to come back next year. Little Chang stamped his foot and insisted, so mother returned to the school and Chang was allowed to watch. The teacher thought that as the rest of the class were already beyond the first steps, Chang would be confused and lose interest.
Instead his eyes lit up with excitement. His enthusiasm and, above all, his powers of concentration marked him out for special attention by the coach. Of course Chang was lucky in one respect. He lived in Shanghai, probably the No. 1 city for go in China.
The city already had a policy of nurturing young talent and it was the easiest place for visiting Japanese players to reach (Game 1 below is a 7-stone game against Yasunaga when Chang was seven years old). With that sort of background it was hardly likely they would let someone like Chang slip through their fingers.
Personal sacrifices
There was a problem, though. In 1986, just ten years old, Chang Hao qualified for the national training squad. No matter how much Shanghai might preen itself, there are times when it must kowtow to Beijing. This was such an occasion. If Chang was to take up his squad place, he had to move to Beijing. The system didn't make that much allowance for prodigies.
Mother (Zhou Yueyuan) came to the rescue again. She gave up her job - not an easy thing to do in pre-capitalist days - and moved with her son to Beijing. She joined a school for sightseeing guides so that she could work and support him.
This was the year when China held its first Go Prodigies Cup. Most countries would be happy to have one prodigy, but China had so many it could afford to hold a tournament! The winner was Chang. His impressive game in that event against Luo Xihe, a year younger but now 8-dan (and 4th in the national rankings) is given below.
Making waves
At this time Chang was taking 3 or 4 stones from the top players. Early in 1985 he played Chen Zude twice on 4 stones and lost. In October that year he played him again on 3 stones and won by 1 point. It was adjudged that he had improved a stone and half in about 9 months.
His special talent was such that the great Nie Weiping unusually also took him under his wing. It was in this year, too, that he qualified as 1-dan, but in China that did not make him a pro as it would in Japan. Too much competition. He would need to reach 4-dan even to contemplate that.
As it happened, the year he made 4-dan, 1990 was the year he became (though still as 3-dan) China's entrant to the 12th World Amateur Championship in Japan. Once again his talent was too much to ignore, for he had, unusually been awarded the entry by special recommendation rather than having to go through the usual process of the qualification tournament - a major event in the Chinese calendar then. The reason? He had just finished seventh in the National Individual Championships.
Chang won the World Amateur in Hiroshima with 8/8 and in the process became the youngest ever winner, lowering the record previously held by 18-year old Ma Xiaochun. His game against the runner-up is also given below.
Taking wing
But dragons soar ever upwards, and Chang continued his ascent, slow but sure. As he laboriously caught up with the higher ranked players, in 1993 he unsuccessfully but tenaciously challenged Ma Xiaochun for his Daguoshou title and in 1995 he won the National Championship as 7-dan, ahead of Yu Bin 9-dan. Then a little more consolidation before taking the Tianyuan title 3-1 from Ma in 1997, and after that there was no looking back.
1997 was a tough year for Ma. He lost his Bawang title to Wang Lei 6-dan. But that set up a showdown of classic proportions between Chang and Wang, a year younger, because Wang also won the right to challenge Chang in a best-of-five for his new Tianyuan title while Chang won the challengership for the new Lebaishi Cup, also a best-of-five final. Since this was the immediate replacement for the Bawang, Wang was made the sitting tenant or de facto title holder.
The showdown was naturally billed as a Ten-Game Match. It as a dream match for the new sponsors who had just made the Lebaishi Cup by far the most lucrative tournament in China (128,000 yuan winner's prize). And the big-time atmosphere was fortuitously accentuated that year, because the national training squad camp was held in Kunming and Lijiang in Yunnan Province.
Lijiang, capital of the Naxi Minority, had suffered a massive earthquake in 1996, and was being rebuilt. Part of the rebuilding was the Lijiang Grand Hotel, a five-star monster financed by a Chinese-Thai joint venture and run by Europeans - a sign of the times in China. It opened early in 1997, just in time to house the training squad (at the locals' expense) of 34 pros and six helpers. It was inevitable that the "Ten-game Match" began there.
Chang Hao made sure there was no doubt about where the record prize money was going, by clocking up a 3-0 victory in the Lebaishi Cup, but maybe his attention wasn't so focused on the 1,000 yuan prize in the Tuanyuan where he had taken the full course to a 3-2 win. The rivalry with Ma resumed in 1999, however, when Chang took the first Qisheng title by a whisker.
Taking it to the streets
Yet the really big prize for a Chinese player is the street cred that goes with performing well in international tournaments. Chang had yet to prove himself there. Indeed, in this area he was perhaps behind his contemporaries such as Zhou Heyang who was beating Yi Ch'ang-ho, Ch'oe Myeong-hun and Takemiya Masaki in the Fujitsu Cup.
But a dragon hides in the clouds, only to re-emerge in greater splendour, and Chang has recently started to make his presence felt on the international stage. He had already cut his teeth against the Japanese in the Japan-China Supergo series, where, in martial arts style, the winner of the most recent match keeps his place in the ring while taking on newcomers from the other side until he loses. He notched up an impressive 6 wins in a row in the 10th Supergo.
That was only the Japanese, however. The Koreans provide the real benchmark at present. Recently Chang was the only Chinese left in the semi-finals of the 1st Chunlan Cup, against three Koreans, and he reached the quarter-finals of the 4th LG Cup and the same stage in the 4th Samsung Cup, falling to Koreans in each case. Yet he has remained at the top of the Chinese Elo-type ranking list for a good two years, consistently improving his score. This is the sort of consistency that surely betokens some sort of international success in the future.
Deceptive success?
Or is his age against him?! In some respects the Chinese system creates a deceptive impression of the strength of the new kids, for the truth is that the constant travelling is better suited to young, unattached people than it is to the older players.
Chang Hao is the first to stress that his place at the top of the Chinese rankings must be influenced by the fact that rivals like Ma Xiaochun no longer play in all the events that attract ranking points.
And it has long been noted that pros' results taper off dramatically when they lose their powers of concentration, i.e. get married. Chang Hao has recently married Zhang Xuan 8-dan!
Here are some of Chang Hao's games to download in sgf format. Right-click and choose "save link as" to save on your machine.
Game 1: 1984-02-16 - 7 stones v. Yasunaga Hajime
Game 2: 1986-01-21 - 1st Prodigies Cup (v. Luo Xihe)
Game 3: 1990-05-23 - 12th World Amateur (v. An Kwan-uk)
The next game is chosen because, while Chang claims (like chess champion Anatoly Karpov) to have no style, and to simply adapt to whoever he is playing, he admires the games of Kobayashi. Chang believes winning comes first and artistic merit comes a very remote second, but maybe it's because there's a little bit of guilt there that makes him play over Kobayashi's expressive games.
Game 4: 1996-12-25 - 11th Supergo (v. Kobayashi Satoru)
Game 5: 1997-07-16 - 1st Tengen/Chunweon (v. Yi Ch'ang-ho)
See also the two games under the 1st Qisheng (1999) against Ma Xiaochun.
Chang Hao - Career milestones
1-dan: 1986
2-dan: 1988
3-dan: 1989
4-dan: 1990
5-dan: 1992
6-dan: 1994
7-dan: 1995
8-dan: 1997
9-dan: 1999
