What is the procedure for becoming a Weiqi professional in Taiwan? Is there any age limit like in Korea, China, and Japan?
@claire_yang maybe?
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I heard they removed the age limit in China recently enough.
Like they have age categories now or something. Maybe someone else can confirm.
Edit: This was on l19 in 2019
This year’s PQT will be split into 4 groups.
- U25 Male: participants must be born on Jan 1st 1994 or after.
- U25 Female: same age limit as group 1.
- Male adult: born on Dec 31 1993 or before.
- Female adult: same age limit as group 3.
Group 1, 2, 3, 4 will issue 20, 10, 10, 4 pro certificates respectively for a total of 44 new pro certs.
Yes, there are still limits for participating in Taiwanese pro qualification.
There are two types of qualifications, general public and insei. For the general public, the limits are for men born after 2004/7/1 (age 20) and women born after 2002/7/1 (age 22), and require at least 6 dan amateur diplomas. The oldest Insei ages that can still be retained in the program are for boys born after 2007/9/1 (age 17) and after 2005/9/1 (age 19) for girls. Those who failed in insei pro qualification match will join the general public matches as well, so Insei has extra opportunities to advance.
There are special promotions for high dan amateurs if they win international tournaments though (not a regular channel and very rare).
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Is it the same difficulty to be a 6d ama as in mainland China?
In general, it’s a lot easier, but depends. There are highly competitive amateur tournaments and there are easier ones. So the strength difference of Taiwanese 6d is also quite huge (it used to be a lot harder). The jump to 7d is the most difficult one (there are 10 times fewer 7d than 6d, not every tournament has 6d group to participate in, mostly only the national-wise tournaments)
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I know two Taiwanese amateurs who live in the Netherland tor some 10 years.
For both of them their EGF rank is 2 ranks lower than their Taiwanese rank. One is 6d in Taiwan and the other 1d.
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I would say for the last decade or two, the effect of “promoting” Go in Taiwan, although increased the total number of players (and the number of “dan players”), but at the cost of diluting the strength quite a bit, especially at the range around 1d to 5d. In general, I’d say 1d to 5d here would be considered low-dan in many places (although their strength levels varied a lot), and the mid-dan only starts at 6d, and the high-dan strength at 7d (or strong 6d, since stronger kids don’t even bother to partake 6d amateur tournaments, and go straight to insei).
There are some measurements and new rules that started to be implemented in very recent years, like more regulations for the kyu ranks, and tournament qualifications, as well as different ranking qualification tests with somewhat standardized tests. Only time will tell if any of these would work in the long run.
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