The history and evolution of kyu rank in Go game

I’ve been feeling terrible for the past week, didn’t have much progress, but the investigation of the kyu ranking would still continue, just take a bit longer.

Here is the oldest known game I found that definitively involved a player that has a weaker rank than a Hoensha 9k (1d). The 9k player 佐藤民之助 gave 2 handicaps to an unknown player and still won. And this put the black player at a strength of Hoensha 11k according to their ranking system.

transcribed record below:

What do you all think about the black player’s strength? On par with a modern high SDK player?

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