Winning percentages
Summer 2001 I got the GoGoD Database CD ROM from John Fairbairn and T. Mark Hall. There are nearly 12,000 games in the database. With the tools that John wrote, I gathered some statistics about Cho's opening play. At the time I did this, there were 1154 games by Cho in the database (and in mine, I send John the Cho games I have found). I compared them with all the games from 1966 and later. I didn't differentiate for the different komi (note that there are some 80 Oteai non komi games by Cho).
|
O P E N I N G P A T T E R N |
Cho with Black | Cho with White | Database games (from 1966) | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| % win | N | % win | N | % B win | N | |
| Any pattern (all games) | 63.5% | 575 | 59.6% | 579 | 53.2% | 8196 |
| Opening with Hoshi | 60.8% | 319 | 58.9% | 360 | 53.7% | 5368 |
| Ni ren sei (including san ren sei) | 57.1% | 107 | 59.3% | 113 | 54,5% | 1469 |
| San ren sei | 51.4% | 37 | 69.1% | 55 | 50.1% | 437 |
| Low Chinese | 70.2% | 47 | 69.6% | 23 | 52,2% | 408 |
| High Chinese | 76.5% | 17 | 81.8% | 22 | 55.9% | 340 |
| Opening with Komoku | 68.7% | 217 | 61.0% | 210 | 52.4% | 2560 |
| Any low shimari (first five moves) | 65.2% | 141 | 58,9% | 175 | 51.9% | 1785 |
| Low shimari + komoku parallel | 63.5% | 52 | 58.3% | 36 | 54.3% | 488 |
| Low shimari + hoshi parallel | 53.8% | 13 | 54.3% | 46 | 50.5% | 479 |
| Low shimari + sansan parallel | 83.3% | 6 | 50.0% | 2 | 51.0% | 49 |
| Shusaku 1-3-5 | 78,9% | 19 | 63.6% | 11 | 58.1% | 203 |
| Variant 1-3-5 (5 on Hoshi) | 90.9% | 11 | None | 0 | 60.0% | 70 |
| Opening with sansan | 58.6% | 29 | 100% | 5 | 50.5% | 105 |
| Sansan on move 1 or 3 (or both) | 61.8% | 34 | 86.7% | 14 | -//- | -//- |
Percentages and counts include rotations and mirror images of the (standard) opening pattern. I think these figures are quite interesting, but please draw your own conclusions.
Where does Cho play the second move with white?
A couple of years ago I already noticed that Cho plays his second move more often in the adjacent corner than in the diagonally opposite corner. Thanks again to the database I could now actually count this, and compare it to the overall pattern. The results are really surprising. Against hoshi Cho has played 76% in the adjacent corner, the over-all average is 56.4%. Against komoku Cho has played 83.3% of his second move in the adjacent corner, the over-all average is 67.4%.
Now what does that mean? It probably means that stronger players would welcome a diagonal fuseki, which might be a little bit too slow for black with 5.5 komi. As an example, take all the games in the database [from 1966], where black plays a low chinese fuseki and white opposes with two hoshi's. White wins exactly 50% (of 102 games) when he plays the second move in the adjacent corner, and only 45.7% (of 116 games) when move 2 is in the diagonally opposite corner. There is only one possible conclusion: the players that played in the adjacent corner were the stronger players!