The Winning Streak
The main draw of the Women's Guksu had begun.
Three hours each, with three periods of 90-second byo-yomi. Less punishing than the five-hour open qualifiers, but still a match that demanded I pour out everything I had for half a day. My stamina hadn't improved dramatically, but I believed something positive had changed. At the very least, I could manage a few push-ups now.
I unfastened the wristwatch my father had given me as a match-day gift and set it on the table, then carefully laid out a bar of chocolate and some grape-flavored candies beside it. At the back of the game hall, I steeped a bag of green tea in a paper cup of hot water. For the sake of concentration, I had politely declined every pre-match interview — which meant my opponent, Yoo Dasom 1-dan, had apparently become the sole target of the reporters and was being put through the wringer.
She arrived a little late and took her seat across from me. It was time for the opening match of the main draw.
Nigiri. Black. Move one: the upper-right star point. Her move two: the lower-left star point. Move three: I slotted a diagonal approach against that corner. Move four: her knight's-move extension in reply. Move five: my komoku in the lower right. Move six, she filled the upper-left star point, and with move seven I claimed the lower side.
The Kobayashi opening.
A fuseki favored by a certain Japanese professional — an opening of extreme territorial emphasis. Her white stones came pressing in over my lower-right corner. When I reinforced the right side, Yoo Dasom 1-dan burned ten minutes of deep thought before jabbing sharply at my lower side. If I defended the corner instead of the side, white would now infiltrate the right. From her standpoint, a perfectly acceptable exchange.
And now there was a san-san invasion, played without the slightest hesitation. I forced stones into her upper-left corner, and rather than completing the orthodox joseki, white launched an irregular pincer against my right side. The fuseki stones of both corners had become a hopelessly tangled web.
In my head, I played out one variation after another, watching the stones shift and mutate.
"…"
I drained my green tea, unwrapped a candy, and dropped it into my mouth. Leaning on the caffeine and the sugar, I sank back into thought.
Long think. Twenty minutes, minimum, of unbroken concentration.
Tap.
Having weighed even the smallest details, I finished my review and placed my stone — a move that pressed the weakness of both floating groups while claiming territory, a decision made with a more forgiving checklist than the one Shin Chang-mo had once used. It was the conclusion I had reached after careful deliberation, and yet I felt short of conviction. Uneasy.
Festina lente.
"Make haste slowly" — the Latin proverb said to be a favorite of Augustus, the great Roman emperor. Decisiveness and caution: a logical paradox, an instruction to pursue two opposing values at once. I took it to mean: don't be rash, but don't just sit idle waiting for the perfect opportunity either. In the end it was a lesson about balance — which, I supposed, put it on the same ground as the Doctrine of the Mean that Confucius had preached all his life.
Twenty minutes. The time had swelled in proportion to my anxiety, the result of drowning in trivia — a considerable drift from the equilibrium Augustus had in mind.
Balance had to be sought, yes, but rushing after it only backfired. To act carelessly and commit some obvious, entirely preventable mistake — that was a sin. While my opponent thought, I emptied the tangle from my head. Despite my efforts, stray thoughts, ordinary daily worries, and scraps of feeling kept weaving themselves into a messy knot, and I unwound the skein slowly, without hurrying.
Tap.
The sound of my opponent placing her stone. That crisp ripple was all that echoed, quiet and clear, through my consciousness. I read her intention. The most effective response surfaced. I identified the latent dangers and evaluated whether the effect I wanted was actually achievable. The rhythm of my thinking was lighter than before — but still too slow. A little faster. Without urgency, I drew the tempo upward, patiently. Quicker than my opponent, yet with more care.
"…"
I want it to stop. Just make it stop.
Yoo Dasom 1-dan clutched her throbbing head. "One, two, three…"
But the moment she stopped, she lost. She had no desire to end her first major-tournament match on a timeout or a resignation without striking a single blow. "Eight, nine…"
Tap.
Two byo-yomi periods left. She fought off the temptation — just burn one on this move and give myself a moment's rest — and stole a glance at Ryu Seoa. A game that had run past six hours. The girl, her hair tied up neatly with a blue ribbon, was almost unreasonably calm.
Tap.
The most hateful sound in the world right now. The start of another 90-second countdown. There was no spare breath to spend wondering about Ryu Seoa. "Seven, eight…"
Tap.
Fortunately her reading of the move finished quickly, and she was able to catch her breath for a moment. No serious mistakes so far. No — if anything, she was in better form than usual. Which meant, in the end, it came down to the gap in skill. She could not simply refuse to face the stark reality that Ryu Seoa 2-dan's ability was on another level. But there was no reason to stop because of it. As long as the odds weren't zero, she would keep challenging. Strong opponent or weak, she would simply keep playing her own Go with everything she had.
Tap.
Unlike herself, drowning in the byo-yomi, Ryu Seoa sat with twenty minutes of main time banked and all three byo-yomi periods untouched.
The endgame. The final branching point of the game — the moment that demanded full force. Spend one byo-yomi period, and 180 seconds remained. A moment when even a single second was precious. Harried by the clock, she had long since lost track of the precise count; all she could do was play the best move she could find. "Six, seven, eight…"
Tap.
It was no brilliant stroke of genius, but it was a fine move she could hold up without shame.
Tap.
Ryu Seoa erased that flicker of pride immediately, attacking in no-time. She was being read completely.
Tap.
No margin for despair.
Tap.
The variables kept shrinking as the game wound toward its conclusion.
Tap.
Every time Ryu Seoa spent as much time as she liked to shave off some petty gain, it chafed somewhere deep. By her generous estimate, a loss of five and a half points. A definitive defeat. The odds of winning had been slim from the start, but that didn't stop it from stinging.
Tap.
Steadying herself, Yoo Dasom 1-dan kept running toward the finish line.
There was no leisure to savor my advance to the quarterfinals — the schedule simply piled on. Over the past week, the Janggwanjang Cup had been underway: a win-streak team tournament, five of Korea, China, and Japan's top female players each, with a total prize pool of 80 million won. One hour each, with five periods of 40-second byo-yomi.
Lee Na-ye 9-dan, with whom I had history from China, led as our spearhead. She dispatched Wei An 7-dan of China and then Karishima Yuriko 5-dan, Japan's Women's Meijin, in succession — but her momentum snapped against Lin Feng 9-dan of China, and she fell. She had taken a break for personal reasons, but as if to prove she wasn't China's strongest female player for nothing, she went on a monstrous five-game winning streak.
And with that, the first round concluded. Three Korean players, one Chinese player, and three Japanese players eliminated. For Korea, only Lee Hye-na 6-dan, the Women's Kiseong titleholder, and I as the anchor remained. The second round would follow next month.
With the Women's Guksu quarterfinal looming, I found myself sunk in a different problem entirely.
"Hmm…"
A foreign-currency account and a brokerage account. I had carved time out of my packed schedule to go to the bank with my mother and open them. Prize money, game fees, the allowances my parents had been slipping into my account — scraped together, it added up to a substantial sum.
I was still hopelessly ignorant of stocks, but some things had filtered through even to me, and there were a few sure bets I knew. Any company that had survived the AlphaGo shock — you couldn't not know them. ○gle, which would entrench itself as the luxury of modern life through innovation and design. ○cebook, the social network whose No. 1 market share would come to rule people's daily routines. ○mazon, which would one day dominate the world's online retail market. Companies likened to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — the forces that, before long, would bend the world economy to their will.
Money that would multiply several-fold. No — tens of times over. If I kept pouring my future prize winnings into the market, it could swell beyond anything I could handle.
"Phew…"
But if I wanted what I wanted, there was no way around it. Life is short, and what any one person can achieve is limited. Was it too greedy, to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence and use it as a tool for my own advancement?
"…"
I tilted my head back. If I had intended to do it halfway and be satisfied with less, I should never have started at all.
Life is short, and individual achievement is finite. Unless you seized every means within reach and used them all, the winds of the years would sweep over you — and in the end, not even your footprints would remain.