Teenage Go prodigy Sumire Nakamura on Monday defeated Asami Ueno, a 21-year-old female Kisei, becoming the youngest player to have captured one of the major titles in the traditional board game in Japan at 13 years and 11 months.
By winning the women's Kisei match, Nakamura, who was a third-degree professional Go player, broke the previous record set in 2014 by Rina Fujisawa, now a 24-year-old female Honinbo, who won the Aizu Chuo Hospital cup at age 15 years and nine months.
In mixed tournaments, the youngest title winner was Yuta Iyama, now a 33-year-old male holder of three titles, who won the Agon-Kiriyama cup in 2005 at 16 years and four months.
Nakamura, a second-year junior high school student from Osaka, started playing Go at 3 and spent time honing her skills in South Korea. Her 49-year-old father, Shinya Nakamura, is also a ninth-degree professional Go player.
In 2019, she was recognized as the youngest professional Go player in Japan at the age of 10, and later also became the youngest player to qualify to challenge for a title in a women's Meijin tournament at 13 years and one month.
In the women's Kisei, one of five major professional female tournaments in Japan, the titleholder and a challenger compete in three rounds of Go, with the winner able to claim the title.
The game of Go originated in China more than 2,500 years ago and is played between two people. Players take turns placing black or white stones on a board to capture their opponent's stones or claim territory by surrounding empty spaces.
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