Sakata was 64 when he millideified.

If Sakata's 1000th win made him 1/1000th of a deity... does that mean 1 million wins as a professional makes somebody a god?

If Sakata's 1000th win made him 1/1000th of a deity... does that mean 1 million wins as a professional makes somebody a god?

Or think millipede rather than millimetre?

An update to an earlier report I made somewhere: Yuki Satoshi has now achieved his 1,000th career win and so has become the youngest and the fastest to do this in Japan, beating Cho Chikun's record, and hsi winning ratio is out of sight.

He beat Yata Naoki on 2011-04-11 to reach the milestone. At that point his career record was 1000 wins, 371 losses and 2 jigos, for a winning ratio of 72.9%. At this point he has been a pro for 27 years and 1 month (he became pro at 12) and was ten months shy of his 40th birthday. Cho was 43 years 1 month when he set the previous record.

Cho still has the record for the most career wins - currrently 1365, but in a race with Rin Kaiho, now on 1364.

Fourteen players have now reached 1,000 wins in Japan. Sakata Eio was the first, in 1984. In some ways that the most impressive case as he was playing in a period of much fewer tournaments. As a measure of how much he stood out, it was over ten years before another player reached 1,000. However, Sakata was 64 when he millideified.

Yuki is the third Kansai Ki-in player to the target, after Honda Kunihisa and Hashimoto Shoji. You might expect Hashimoto Utaro to be in there, and indeed he did win 1,082 games out of 1,535 in the GoGoD database, but that includes some handicap games and games not counted as official in his early days. Close but no cigar. BTW Go Seigen didn't even play 1,000 games, but this week we have just found another game missing from his collectanea.

I don't know how amateur tournament rating systems work but they have something to do with probability of winning. WOuld Yuki's amazing 72% win ratio mean that he is a rank or more stronger than the 9-dan number would indicate?

the reason is that top players don't compete only among themselves but play also many weaker opponents, so they collect surprisingly high overall performance

If Sakata's 1000th win made him 1/1000th of a deity... does that mean 1 million wins as a professional makes somebody a god?

Perhaps so, but I don't think that top title holders play very many tournament games with players ranked below 7-dan. The top players are seeded out of the preliminary rounds where the low dan ranks play. It would be interesting to see what the win percentage of people like Kobayashi Koichi and Cho Chikun was during the years when they held most of the Japanese titles. In the past when the Oteai determined players' ranks some of these star players zoomed up the rank scale losing very few games. In the rating tournament they played only players within a rank or two of themselves.

Is it easy to get the same data aggregated over a longer period of time?

Suppose one plays 10+10 minutes lightning games, 40 games a day. It then takes about 68 and half years to play a million games.

...Fourteen players have now reached 1,000 wins in Japan. Sakata Eio was the first, in 1984. In some ways that the most impressive case as he was playing in a period of much fewer tournaments. As a measure of how much he stood out, it was over ten years before another player reached 1,000. However, Sakata was 64 when he millideified....