10-Year-Old to Become Youngest Professional Go Player
Sumire Nakamura started playing Go at the age of three. By the age of seven she was competing in national tournaments in Japan. In April, she will become the youngest professional Go player in the world.
Nakamura will be 10 years old when she receives the professional rank of first dan, the lowest "master" rank, on April 1. She will break the record set by Rina Fujisawa, who became a professional player at the age of 11 in 2010.
Go is played on a 19-by-19 grid, where players place black and white stones to control space on the board. Chang Hsu, a ninth-dan player, tested Nakamura for the Japan Go Association. He said he was surprised that someone as young as Nakamura was so good at the game.
Nakamura was encouraged to play by her father, a ninth-dan professional player who won a national competition in 1998. "I'm happy when I win," the younger Nakamura said, adding that she wants to win a professional competition while she's in junior high school.
Nakamura will be the first player to become a professional under a Go Association program that encourages new, young players to compete internationally.
Go fans hope that Nakamura will create new interest in the game, just as 16-year-old Sota Fuji has brought attention to shogi, a kind of Japanese chess. In December, Fuji became the youngest player to win 100 official matches, and he started his pro career with a record-setting 29-game winning streak that ran from December 2016 to July 2017.
It's believed Go was invented in China over 2,500 years ago. There are an estimated 20 million players around the world, most of them in Asia.
