The longest recorded professional game?

I was wandering around Sensei’s Library on the RandomPage and found this:

[Yamabe Toshiro is] remembered for playing the longest recorded professional game, 411 moves, against Hoshino Toshi in the 1950 Oteai.

Here is the game on Waltheri.

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Unsurprisingly, there are quite a few Ko captures… I think I counted 68?

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411, is that all!? Pah! That’s nothing compared to the longest possible game, which is a mere 361 * 2^153 = 4,121,891,336,534,812,136,496,329,879,770,141,953,873,372,250,112 moves :rofl:

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411 is 50 more moves as what can fit on a board.

Although it doesn’t seem to be a real problem I am curious of the correct procedure when counting the game under different rules.

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A friend of mine just started playing Go. We had a game where I pretty much killed everything then I proceeded to fill in all my own eyes but one then let him play in my only eye to clear the board and we started all over again. That must have been a longer game ha

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I guess it’s not that difficult to set your own personal record

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I guess you can exchange prisoners and then count as usual.

Yep I said no problem just how it is formulated in official rules. (Under Chinese you won’t even exchange prisoners …)

All of the official rules assume an infinite supply of stones, so players simply have to improvise (like borrow from another set) if they run out.

Technically, the Ing rules mandate a precisely fixed number of stones for their suggested counting system, but, in practice, I think that one would not actually be constrained by that limit and should just borrow stones if needed.

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That is true but I thought I would be fun for a beginner to take all of my stones with one move. It might have shown him the effects of a liberty shortage on a grand scale or the importance of having two eyes. I’m going to be honest I have no idea how to teach Go!

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I played it out with my real equipment. I really realised how much capturing and ko there is.

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More here

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Cool to see a game that lasted exactly 361 (=19x19) moves!

“Longest title match game” according to that page, wonder if it’s been beaten since?

Also move 69 in that game is super nice.
(no seriously, check the game!)

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The record shortest counted professional game mentioned in the Mindzine article (Komatsu–Zhang 1992, 136 moves) was beaten soon after publication by Takemiya–Cho U 2003, 121 moves, which was reviewed by Nick Sibicky five years ago.

121 is a smidgen under a third of 411 (29%).

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Almost as long was this 402 move long* europroleague between Tanguy le Calve and Pavol Lisy from last july, real thriller with 119 captured or dead stones. Worth noting that according to kata, only 1 of all those moves was bigger than -3.4 point mistake ^^

Euro Pro League

*with 2 passes

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