I just recently crushed with this professional go player Lee Hajin (currently 3p when this blog posted), So who is she? Why? and How?

My first crush will be Yukari Umezawa, age 43 (currently 6p when this blog posted), I like her because she used or I think she’s still the most beautiful woman in professional go, she supervised the production of hikaru no go manga and the way she picked the games in hikaru no go is perfect and the way she teaches in Go Go Igo is cute and she got the brain as well since she held the title of Female Kisei for 3 years 2009-2011 (I think, I need to double check).

the second I think is Joanne Missingham (Hei Jia Jia) I used her picture in this blog post however since she’s a quiet player I have to crossed her name.

Lee Hajin, age 28, is actively in Go organization, in her Linkedin Profile stated she’s the secretary general of The International Go Federation (IGF) which one of few organised AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol (Yi Se-tol) big match. By the age of 17 she was famous as Lee Hajin Storm where she had winning streak looks out of ordinary. She “anonymously” had stream go games from Tygem on youtube under the name Haylee but in February 2015, Lee revealed that she was the recent Youtube Go streamer Haylee.

In the first 15-20 seconds of her streams you will smile of her cuteness laughs and greetings but in the game she will try to explain the reasoning of the moves, how opponent should reply the moves, even she sometimes does experiments on fuseki like tengen, although it’s not new it’s rarely played also she played mirror go in one of her streams, I think you got the idea. You will learn a lot watching her streams, if you going to watch her streams I would advise to pause a moment and try guessing and reasoning of the next moves. And this where she had me, there are no other pro willing to play and explain in the game, Yes, An Younggil (8p) actively teaching and commenting in gogameguru, Kim Myungwan (9p) also very active in commenting other professional game in youtube AGA Channel, Michael Redmond (9p) also had some of his games he reviewed and published but never live game (and they are male), SHE’S THE FIRST AND PROBABLY THE ONLY ONE DOING IT FOR FREE (WHY AM I YELLING?) How can you not like her?

She recently published her book “Outside the Board“, diary of a professional go player, the book is not only narrates of her personal story but also has few reviewed games, definitely a must read. You can see the sample and introduction of the book here. The cost to get the book to Indonesia is roughly 45 USD, trust me it will be well spent and worth it. I haven’t read it but I once I have I will review in next blog post.

Also if you like her stream go games you can also donate to her paypal account and you will be listed as donator on her facebook notes. Some of her stream games has been recorded to sgf record here courtesy of Ger de Groot, though not all games are there and the episode is not properly updated but since it’s open for crowd-source you can help by generating the sgf file and upload it to help complete the record.

Who is your go crush and why?