"The 2014 Ten-Game Match between Gu Li and Lee Sedol" volume 1 by Rob van Zeijst, volume 2 by Rob van Zeijst and Michael Redmond, published by Kiseido Publishing Company
The story of who is on top of the go world is continuously evolving. In the time since I started following the professional scene (about 2003) things have evolved quite a bit. At that time the main scene was still Japan but Korea had begun to take ascendency in international titles. Lee Chang Ho (the Korean superstar) had already been on the scene for some time. The Koreans as a whole continued to rise and have produced many more #1 players. Although Lee Chang Ho himself had a placid, endgame oriented style, the wave of top notch pros who came after him were known for being ultra-aggressive fighters. Koreans and later mainland Chinese players were also comfortable with much shorter time controls than the Japanese players were used to.
As time wore on the mainland Chinese also emerged as a powerhouse in these international tournaments. Also in that time the Taiwanese professional scene has grown and now Taiwanese talents are more likely to stay in Taiwan as opposed to being sent as children to live and study in Japan. In fact a homegrown player recently won an international tournament defeating several of the top players in a row on his way up.
Furthermore, the rise of AI has further revolutionized the game overturning old ideas and forcing players to adapt.
All of this is just to say that in some ways the go world has been moving fast in the last 20 years and a match from 2014 is already in some ways old news. At the time both players were at the peak but have since disappeared from top level play. In fact Lee Sedol himself retired after an extremely publicized defeat in a series of game against Alpha Go, although amazingly Lee managed to take one game from the machine. Lee simply felt there was no point in continuing if he couldn’t be the best go player in the world anymore.
Gu Li is a mainland Chinese player who is much less famous but his lifetime record against Lee Sedol is almost exatly evenly split.
As in the Genjo and Chitoku games, Gu and Lee have contrasting styles though not quite as polarized as Genjo and Chitoku. Both of them are terrific fighters but Gu is definitely superior in the opening and often emerged into the middle game with an advantage. Lee on the other hand excelled at the endgame and could often save games where he emerged from the opening with an unfavorable position.
Unfortunately, one fact that dampens enthusiasm for this match is that despite the almost exact equality of their lifetime records, this match was rather one sided and ended early because Lee had already won 6 games. Various reasons have been put forward for this result. One is that Lee was experiencing his absolute peak during this match. This may be true but it should also be noted that Lee lost two games to Gu in tournaments outside the match while the match was going on. (The match was played at the rate of one game a month.) Another theory is that the match was sponsored by a Chinese company and the games were played in China. This put a large psychological burden on Gu to perform well for fans and sponsors and perhaps even government officials. This may have negatively impacted his ability to play these games well. There were also some questionable venue choices. Two games were played in Tibet at very high altitudes and this seemed to impact Gu more than Lee.
As for the books themselves, I would say they are well made. They were written by a Dutch player who has achieved professional status or studied with professionals in several Asian countries and who has notched some nice wins in professional tournaments. His highest rank was professional 3 dan which is not all that high but it should be remembered that the only Westerner to achieve the rank of 9 dan was Michael Redmond in Japan. And even he is clearly not as strong as the cream of that rank. van Zeijst has synthesized and translated commentary about the games from top flight professionals. Of course all of the commentary is pre-AI. This can either be an attraction or problem depending on your views on AI. For myself, while I am not anti-AI by any means, I find human commentary is better and when commentators use AI they are unable to restrain themselves and simply end up giving lots of computerized variations that less than meaningful to most amateur players. The second volume has the assistance of Redmond although it is unclear how much this impacted the actual content. (There seems to be a tradition of top pros lending their names to books with varying degrees of involvment in the actual substance of the book.) Stylistically there is no difference between the first volume and the second volume. One thing that is worthy of note, is that to fill out the second volume and perhaps to give a more balanced view of the rivalry, those two games that Gu won during the period of the match but in other tournaments are also given with the same degree of commentary.
One thing sets this book apart though and that is the number of variations that are given. There are only 10 games but they span two volumes (although neither volume is terribly thick). So there are many variation diagrams and many specific situations have multiple variation diagrams explaining why certain plausible alternatives don’t work or showing what might have been a better way to play. Some of these variations are quite lengthy.
I approached the games by playing the main games over on a physical board. Because it is not convenient to play out variations on a physical board because things quickly get messy and stones become misplaced I mostly just browsed the variation diagrams. This raises some interesting differences with chess books and particularly how I read chess vs go books. In chess books moves are given in a notation, so a variation is given as long sequence of notation. Usually diagrams are reserved for the main game but certain critical positions in the variations might receive a diagram. For this reason you either have to be able to visualize the board clearly while reading the variation or you have to play it out somehow. For myself, I have improved my visualization somewhat and in some circumstances can follow along without a board, in general that is not really feasible for me. So usually with chess books I play the moves out on a computer with the engine switched off. The software allows me to record the variations and furthermore my own analyses of positions without losing the main thread which it is easy to return to. Go variations are presented in a very different way. This is primarily because the stones don’t really move so moves are given in diagrams that have many moves recorded on them but with the move numbers on the stones that are played in that diagram. For this reason it is generally much easier to follow variations without actually having to visualize or to play them out somehow. There seems to also be a preference for variations because the symetry of the board presents issues and also the board is much larger so the notation quickly becomes cumbersome and there is not a whole lot of standardization. So, I will admit to generally skimming some of the longer variations… as some say in the chess world “Long variation, wrong variation.”
So overall, my assessment of the books is that they are excellent, particularly if you are looking for careful human analysis of a pre-AI battle between the two top players of the time. There is very little of this kind of in depth commentary available in western languages. I myself zipped through them in maybe two or three weeks.
I will say though that in spite of them being excellent, I did have some feeling that they left me a bit cold. I am unclear exactly what to attribute this to. Probably it is more of a personal thing rather than anything really wrong with the books. Perhaps part of it was the one sided nature of the match which drained some of the drama out of it. Perhaps my go mood had already begun to pass. Perhaps I just have a preference for much older games like the Genjo and Chitoku or Shusaku books that I also finished recently. Regardless of this sort of subtle point, I definitely recommend these books. I think they are well worth the price.
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