Tax Collection on the Board
The NJ Fire Cup Unified Preliminaries. Day two of the unified preliminaries, held at the Hankuk Kiwon tournament hall. Round two, Group I of the open bracket.
Seven professionals from China, two from Taiwan, four from Japan, and six from Korea — nineteen pros in all. Add one amateur contender, and the field came to twenty.
Of them, only a single player would walk away with a ticket to the main tournament.
Twelve players had received first-round byes through a computerized random draw; the remaining eight had played their preliminary matches yesterday, and four had already been sent home.
With sixteen players left, the Go world had circled two names as the likely winner of Group I: China's Li Junyan, 6-dan, and Korea's Park Pilgyu, 9-dan.
Li Junyan was one of China's young guns, a top-twenty player in the world rankings, while sixty-three-year-old Park Pilgyu stood as a living legend of Korean Go.
And yet the player drawing the most eyes was neither Li Junyan nor Park Pilgyu, but a lone amateur.
The only female entrant in the open bracket — and the youngest unified preliminary competitor in the tournament's history.
With the front half of the bracket finished, it was now the back half's turn for round two. The entrants who had come to the Hankuk Kiwon all cast a glance or two at the girl sitting quietly at her board.
But interest in her faded as quickly as it had come. Unless she was someone they'd face in the next round, she was just a curious spectacle.
A world title event was the stage of dreams for any Go player. No one could afford to let their attention drift — as if on cue, everyone looked away.
Wei Demei, 3-dan, the girl's round-two opponent, sat down and placed two bottles of water he'd brought with him in front of his seat.
Once settled, he offered a friendly smile and a handshake to the girl, whose features carried a slightly exotic cast for a purebred Korean.
Each player had been allotted two hours, plus five periods of one-minute byo-yomi. They would be facing each other for a long time, and this was Wei Demei's own small gesture of courtesy — putting her at ease so she wouldn't feel uncomfortable.
"I look forward to our game."
"The pleasure is all mine."
When Wei Demei spoke in his clumsy Korean with a smile, the girl answered back in Chinese.
Wei Demei was a little surprised, and felt a genuine warmth toward her — she had apparently studied even the lightest greetings quite diligently.
Plenty of Japanese and Korean players competed on the international stage, but most could manage only two phrases — hello and thank you. That she had learned the language in advance, despite being an amateur who had surely never faced a Chinese professional before, was genuinely impressive.
But however favorable his first impression of her, a game was a game. He might be a lower-ranked pro, yet losing to a girl — an amateur girl, no less — would be beyond embarrassing.
The moment the recorder took his seat beside them, the girl, holding Black, played her first move. The star point in the upper-right corner.
She answered White's star point on the diagonal with the small knight's enclosure at the lower right. After a moment's thought, Wei Demei filled in the upper-left star point, and the girl's fifth move stretched far along the third line, linking the facing small knight point and star point in one long stroke.
The low Chinese opening — one of the Chinese fuseki styles that had come into fashion since the turn of the century. It seemed language wasn't the only thing the girl had studied.
If White tried to stop Black from claiming the side by pressing inward, the shape almost always ended badly, leaving a sour aftertaste.
And so Wei Demei played his sixth move, infiltrating from the outside first.
Move seven.
The girl pounced with a two-space pincer against the invading stone. A rather aggressive choice.
When there's a gap in skill, the textbook response is to play one space wider from the small knight point, securing the corner and side safely. Once the stones began to tangle, the variations grew too complicated for an amateur to handle easily.
Perhaps she trusted the generous time she'd been given, but she had thrown down the challenge outright — there was nothing to do but meet it head-on. Wei Demei attached immediately.
The girl extended toward the inside of the corner while yielding a step back. In that position, Black would usually push back, so Wei Demei found himself mired in thought.
Should he likewise retreat and keep the balance, or indulge in a little greed and block her off?
She was an amateur, so she'd be weak against unorthodox lines that hadn't been studied much, and even a modest act of greed would likely be more than she could answer properly. With a lucky draw giving him the softest possible opponent, and with this being his first preliminary match besides—
A light, confident start would build the momentum he'd need against the formidable players waiting ahead.
Weighing his options for a full five straight minutes, Wei Demei chose the fight.
But after trading a few more moves with the girl, he felt his stomach turn to lead. He snatched up a water bottle, wrenched off the cap, and gulped the water down in great swigs.
He had underestimated her. Overreached. He'd resolved not to take her lightly, and yet the moment he saw an amateur — a young girl — he had privately assumed she'd be a pushover.
A rocky start, to say the least. Still, if he simply avoided any more stupid mistakes from here on, there was no way he could lose.
Wei Demei steadied himself and set about salvaging his position.
But the girl across the board understood all too well exactly how to punish an opponent who had been greedy.
The stone that had infiltrated the corner was lost entirely. In exchange, White had secured considerable influence along the lower side and toward the center — but the shape of the stones forming that sphere of influence was poor.
"...Ugh."
The girl hounded his weaknesses relentlessly, with surgical precision.
Mechanical endgame counting without a single slip.
Having handed over the corner so cheaply, he ought to have squeezed every drop of profit from his superior sphere of influence — but the girl refused to concede so much as half a point of anything that could be shaved away. Like a private tax collector arrived to assess dues, she stripped everything spotless, down to the dust.
Before the concealed wealth of his evaded territory could even be hidden, she struck — infiltrating by surprise, and the instant her case was settled, she slipped away nimbly, leaving him no chance to so much as raise an objection.
There was no satisfaction to be had, no sense of having faithfully discharged one's duty to the state.
What was carved unmistakably into his mind was only the terror, the certainty, that across from this girl, not a single trick would be permitted.
"...Khh."
As if that weren't enough, the girl closed out the exchanges in that region with sente. The moment Wei Demei, holding White, finished answering the local sequence, she drove sharply into the upper-left corner.
Once she seized the leash, she did not let go.
A leash held loosely is useless, but grip it too tightly and it snaps, or the line slips from your hands.
Yet no matter how Wei Demei twisted and writhed this way and that, the girl held the line firm.
He could not go where he wanted. He wished to move elsewhere to grab profit, but she reined him back in with practiced ease.
A horrible feeling — like being trained like a dog.
Wei Demei looked down at the board he had been dragged across for the entire game.
The possibility of defeat — a possibility he had estimated, when he first checked his pairing, as converging on zero percent.
He didn't need complicated calculations to know.
The game had already collapsed beyond any hope of turning it back.
"I lose."
With a hollow, faraway feeling and his mind gone white, Wei Demei gathered up the stones.