in a more positive view, energy, motivation, activities transfered from paper to internet.
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I donât know from what kind of player pool the people are whom youâre asking, but I co-admin a large-ish (~15K members (not 15k 
)) international Go Group on Facebook.
Weâve had these membership questions for YEARS meanwhile:
- Please briefly tell us how you first encountered Go/Baduk/Weiqi.
- Write a small fact you know about Go/Baduk/Weiqi (never mind how trivial).
⌠and I can attest that âAlphaGoâ is one of the answers frequently given to either of these âquestionsâ.
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Strength difference between pros in Light of AI ⢠Life In 19x19 According to this you say at pro level a one stone difference is 300 elo points.
Women, under 15 and over 42 go is consistently 1.5 stones behind the best players everywhere in the world.
I find it shocking that Seo Bongsoo needs the equivalent of an 18 to 21 point handicap against the best pros . . . Before we even get to Shin Jinseo.
Yes, as in roughly 300: in the range of 200-400 Elo per 13 handicap points (a full handicap stone).
For amateur dans it is more in the range of 100-250 and for kyus itâs roughly 50.
And Iâm not the only one who came to this conclusion. See this page by the American(or Canadian?) Mathematician François Labelle about the Elo value of handicap in chess and go.
He shows a similar phenomenon in chess. The Elo value of 1 pawn handicap in chess seems similar to the value of a full handicap stone in go, with a similar dependence on the level of the players.
On goratings.org, I see a median pro Elo rating of 3000-3200. Top pros have a rating of 3400-3700 (with 1 exception of Shin JinSeo).
Seo Bongsoo is at 3150 (within the median range, and still stronger than any European pro). The Elo distance from him to top pros is roughly 400 Elo. At the higher and of the pro range, this may correspond to (roughly) a full handicap stone.
So my bet would be that Seo needs sen-ni handicap (no komi) against top pros.
In the Oteai system, that would have been the proper handicap for a pro rank gap of 3-4. In the EGF system, that would be the proper handicap for a pro rank gap of 3.
As for the exceptionally high rating of Shin JinSeo. I think we cannot really infer handicaps from his rating. I think the Elo system breaks down somewhat for players with very skewed winrates.
It would be interesting to see if Shin Jinseo can really give josen handicap (based on the 200 Elo gap) to Ke Jie and still win 50% of the games.
I donât think Ke Jie would accept such match conditions, but I wouldnât bet on Shin Jinseo if this were to happen, although Ke Jie might play worse than usual, because he might feel humiliated by the handicap.
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I think is started to play after hearing/watching AlphaGo and about the same time a person brought a go board into college - I canât exactly remember the order of the two events but close enough 
I think Iâve met a few people too that have heard of it from AlphaGo
Some people have said there were certain waves of new go players, thereâs an AlphaGo wave, and previously there was a Hikaru no Go wave
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Also Leon Vie wrote articles on all kind of games, including go.
He wrote the first go book in Dutch.
Here are a few screenshots of how go was presented in the Dutch press already in the early seventies.
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Seo Bongsoo sensei played Koreans ranked 5th to 4th which is 400 to 500 elo above him. He lost at a two stone handicap to Park Jungwhan, which with other games included implies whatâs traditionally called the two-stone handicap, 3 sentes or 1.5 dan, (for those reading not aware L19 told me that since the stone before white plays is not a full free handicap stone as it gives up sente, a full handicap stone is twice the value of Komi).
U15 and O42 can be expected to be 3 sentes, 1.5 stones, behind, but The goal could be for the fourth best female player to be behind the fourth best male player by less than komi in 6 years, and then surpass the level of the best male player by that same amount in 12 years. In other words Iâm using respectful standards for women rather than lower standards.
To handle outliers, just I take the fourth best in pro, the copper pro, leaving out the bronze, silver and gold pro, as the definition of a top top pro. We should always assume the top three in any defined pool are outliers.
I find it absolutely fascinating that a pawn handicap coincidentally corresponds to full stone handicap, twice Komi.
Although one slight downside to Hikaru no Go and AlphaGo might be that some people start thinking that significant progress in spreading go can only happen in waves started by a few god-like figures, Hotta Yumi and her husband or David Silver and Demis Hassabis, and so essentially their local efforts at go promotion are kind of pointless.
Edit: Thanks jlt for noticing spelling blooper in names.
Please respect other peopleâs names: Yumi Hotta and Demis Hassabis. (Edit: spelling has been corrected, so this message becomes useless.)
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Autocorrect can be a bane of life . . .
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I mean my point is perhaps a reason why Gennan has an unfairly low amount of helpers is that people donât think their help is that valuable or realise how valuable it is. So thereâs no point them undertaking what could be a considerable burden on them to do so . . . So maybe you could promote go promotion in a way that slightly aggrandises go volunteering? Or maybe by default have it so that everyone who does volunteer is expected to give their own ideas at the table so they feel very important?
I may have given the wrong impression, but Iâm not looking for helpers currently. The Dutch go association may be looking for helpers, but my term on the board ended a year ago, and Iâm mostly out of the loop now.
If you (or anyone else) want to help promote go, you might want to consider offering your services to a go club near you, or your national go association.
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