The Move That Betrays
The Huihe Cup Women's Go Championship.
The Round of 16, played in a haze of exhaustion from too little sleep. My opponent was Greta Meyer, 3-dan, Europe's representative — a player with a day job outside Go. I took Black and won by eighteen points.
Lee Na-ye, 9-dan, facing Ito Sakura 4-dan, also cruised to an easy victory.
We belatedly asked the Korea Ki-in official stationed locally for help and changed lodgings, but the accumulated fatigue of travel and my wrecked sleep cycle refused to mend. My body simply wasn't right. Whether I'd caught a cold or not, my throat was badly swollen, and a low-grade fever had begun to creep in.
And there was no time to recover. The quarterfinals were held the very next day after the Round of 16.
My quarterfinal opponent: Cheng Meiliang, 4-dan of Taiwan.
A wretched game — zhuo ju, a match of blunders. Both she and I played terrible Go, but her condition was the worse of the two.
However ugly the process, I was through to the semifinals. In the eyes of the world I was nothing more than a freshly debuted young pro, so apparently the press was hailing it as some tremendous achievement.
The media also seemed to be sketching out a dream matchup between me and Lee Na-ye 9-dan — since our brackets didn't overlap, we'd meet in the final if neither of us fell — but the other semifinalists were hardly pushovers.
Lee Na-ye 9-dan would face Hui Yun, 5-dan, whose popularity in China had lately shot through the sky. A beauty champion combining skill and looks, enjoying the Zhongguo Qiyuan's full-throated backing and support.
Objectively speaking, of course, Lee Na-ye 9-dan — last year's champion and holder of multiple titles on the Korean women's circuit — had the edge. But she'd caught the same cold as me and her condition was a wreck. An upset couldn't be ruled out.
My semifinal opponent, meanwhile, was Japan's Tsugaru Nonoha, 5-dan. Fourth in the Japanese women's rankings, a genuinely top-class player riding a wave of momentum after capturing two domestic titles last year.
And since I happened to be the one who had toppled Japan's new goddess, Hozumi Asana, the Japanese media was reportedly watching this match very closely indeed.
Chinese rules. Komi of 7.5 points.
Personally, I prefer White in Chinese-run tournaments. With 7.5 komi — a full point more of a handicap than Korea's 6.5 — taking Black means I'd have to milk every drop of the first-move advantage with sharper, more aggressive play just to build a lead.
The nigiri settled it: I took White.
With my condition this poor, even a small comfort like that felt enormous.
Move one. The star point in the upper right corner.
I answered with a komoku in the upper left, offset toward the top.
Move three. A komoku in the lower right, offset toward the left side.
For my fourth move I placed a stone on the lower-left komoku, completing the symmetry.
Tsugaru Nonoha 5-dan approached my lower-left corner with a knight's move.
A pincer.
I surrendered the corner and took thickness instead.
Sealing off that position and then invading the lower right, I once more handed Tsugaru Nonoha points and claimed thickness in return.
So little was known about me. Few game records, no established style — an unknown quantity whose strength couldn't be measured.
And precisely because she was a rookie with no career to speak of, the pain she would face in defeat would be that much heavier.
Perhaps the Japanese media's excessive attention had been weighing on her.
Tsugaru Nonoha 5-dan lost the balance between territory and influence. Black 33. Black 39.
Moves tilted far too heavily toward territory.
Unworthy of the woman who had reached the semifinals on flexibility and razor-sharp instinct — she'd let her emotions sway her hand.
An opening.
My body was in terrible shape, but my mind wasn't so fogged that I'd let a chance like this slip.
I conceded territory on a slant and seized the center.
When the balance tips, the eye that judges the position warps with it. She never felt the danger and contented herself with exchanges.
White's upper-left and center had grown grotesquely bloated.
Only belatedly realizing she had lost her sense of proportion, Tsugaru Nonoha 5-dan gambled on a deep invasion.
A reckless offensive. Her supply lines thinned to threads.
Stones so fragile that even a light probe sent her contorting this way and that.
I pressed her weaknesses and dismantled the top side.
Once I'd harvested overwhelming territory along the top, it was Tsugaru Nonoha 5-dan who grew desperate.
I apportioned my clock carefully, strangled every complication before it could breathe, and hardened my momentum into stone.
A steady endgame.
Victory by 4.5 points.
After exchanging bows and running through a brief review, I went to find Lee Na-ye 9-dan's game.
Hers had already reached the late endgame.
Their head-to-head record: five to nothing. Lee Na-ye 9-dan — rated overwhelmingly favored — was being backed into a corner.
She'd caught the same cold as me, but unlike me, who had at least gotten a few scraps of sleep, she had barely rested at all. Perhaps the fatigue of all that travel had simply piled up on top of it.
Even in a body falling apart, Lee Na-ye 9-dan burned with fighting spirit and threw herself into a desperate struggle — but the outcome only grew more certain with every move.
Lee Na-ye 9-dan lost by 2.5 points.
Hui Yun, 5-dan. Seeing her in the flesh, her looks did live up to the "beauty champion" billing.
And yet I felt nothing like warmth from her.
Even with my senior's poor condition written plainly across her face, Hui Yun didn't so much as offer a handshake — she was devoted entirely to expressing her own emotions.
Lee Na-ye's face was dark. But the moment she saw me, she forced a brightness into it.
"I lost… Seoa, you won yours, right?"
"…Yes."
"Good. That's what matters. She plays well, you know… truth is, my own skill just wasn't enough."
She blamed herself rather than pointing anywhere else for the defeat. An exemplary attitude, truly… but I couldn't dispel the bitterness in my chest.
Still, offering words of comfort wouldn't accomplish much.
The result of the match wouldn't change.
The pain of defeat was Lee Na-ye 9-dan's alone to carry.
The best I could do was rest properly and prepare for the final, two days away. Lee Na-ye would have a packed schedule — I offered to ask the Zhongguo Qiyuan to assign someone to look after me in her place, but she stubbornly waved me off, insisting she would stay by my side until the final was done.
The final, a best-of-three, would be held at yet another venue.
A distance of three or four hours by car. We traveled in transportation arranged by the organizers — straight into rush hour.
The traffic crawled.
With everything going wrong one after another, it felt absurd even to think it, but all of it — every last bit — felt like some vast conspiracy between the organizers and the Zhongguo Qiyuan.
We reached the lodging at 11:48 PM. By the time I'd unpacked and washed up, it was past one in the morning.
As if on cue, the air conditioning had broken down too, leaving the room thick and clammy. The cold only grew worse; every cough felt like it would tear my throat open.
"Ugh…"
The moment dawn broke, Lee Na-ye went out and brought back medicine, but it offered little beyond mild pain relief and a softening of the symptoms.
A cold takes its seven days, medicine or no.
I slept through an entire day, only to keep waking drenched in fever and sweat, drifting off and surfacing again and again. The quality of my sleep: rock bottom.
Still, I dragged my leaden body toward the match venue.
On the TV I'd half-watched between my fitful dozes, the Chinese Go world was beside itself with euphoria over Hui Yun 5-dan, conqueror of Lee Na-ye 9-dan. The championship was already being treated as a foregone conclusion; I was dismissed as an inflated bubble who had floated up on bracket luck alone.
With my mind swimming, I pulled myself together and got through the pre-match interview. Reality registered in fragments, everything sweeping past with a surreal, weightless speed.
Hui Yun, 5-dan.
Made up with extra care for the occasion, she looked like a fairy stepped out of an old legend.
"…Pull yourself together."
Sitting down before the board, I murmured it to myself and gathered my scattered consciousness.
But the lines of the board swam in and out of focus, and my hand trembled at the mere touch of a stone.
Hui Yun 5-dan had taken White.
I placed my first move with shaking fingers.
The strategies I had prepared, the opening frameworks I'd mapped out — none of them would surface. All I could do was chase after some faint, flickering thread of sensation by sheer force.
A shambles. More pitiful than when I'd played online Go at Grandfather's house after my long hiatus.
My stones carried neither strength nor conviction. I was simply being pushed around, this way and that, by Hui Yun 5-dan.
The middle game.
I knew it. My opponent knew it. Probably everyone watching this game knew it — the outcome had been decided.
That's right. I just need to rest well today. No one to blame but myself; I'd failed to manage my own condition.
Thinking that, I reached to set the stone down quickly — anything to hurry toward rest.
Hui Yun 5-dan met my listless eyes, let out a little giggle, and placed her stone.
A move that aids the enemy.
Not a mistake.
Deliberate. Unmistakably deliberate.
I felt something inside me snap.