Yesterday (6/15/2014) I was honored to meet Denji Aihara, a Japanese Go professional. He and his wife were visiting Omaha and wanted to meet any local go players. Several of us from the Lincoln Go Club drove up to Omaha, about an hour away, to meet with them.
Both he and his wife were very gracious and genuinely excited to play go with us. I played an even game with Denji-sensei (I hope that is the correct honorific) and he was very nice to me on the go board, but I still managed to lose in true kyu style, lol. The game is below, I took black.
(the friend who was recording my game had some trouble with the go client I use on my phone, so the first few moves are out of order)
crodgers-DenjiAihara.sgf (680 Bytes)
I then played an even game against Denji-sensei’s wife. He told us that she is a Japanese 1d, but added the caveat that “Japanese rankings very sweet.” which we took to mean that Japanese amateur rankings are not as strong as other ranking systems. I won my game with her. Unfortunately, I don’t have a record for that one. I will try and replay it on a demo board soon.
EDIT: I tried to play out the game on a demo board, but didn’t get too far 
. This is as much as I am able to remember. I’m not 100% sure, but it’s pretty close. I played as black again.
demo-23927.sgf (623 Bytes)
I ended up killing a large chunk of stones with an endgame tesuji to secure my win. Too bad I can’t remember enough of the game to show it, haha.
At the end of the day, Denji-sensei gave us each a copy of his book, http://goo.gl/J22IGn, and signed them for us.
It was a great experience. Even better, he is coming to Lincoln on Wednesday (6/18/2014) to play more go with us!
(Hopefully, I will have some pictures to post soon)
