Two years ago, 27-year-old Go player Zhan Ying was ready to give up on her sporting dreams. Eight years after gaining admittance to the elite club of female professional Go players on the Chinese mainland, she had yet to win a single major title. In the previous season of the Chinese Women’s League A — the country’s top division — she lost 16 of her 18 matches and watched as her 2-16 record became something of a joke on social media. Her side gig as a commentator for a lower-level pro-am league had also ended, and with it a major source of her income.

“It felt like everything had been taken away from me,” Zhan tells Sixth Tone on a stormy May afternoon at her Beijing studio.

Fearing that she could no longer afford living in the capital, the now 29-year-old player made up her mind to transition to coaching. But first, she had a final milestone to reach: increasing the followers of her livestream channel from 47,000 to 50,000.

That decision, born out of what Zhan calls an “obsession with round numbers,” changed everything. During a stream on the evening of Oct. 26, 2022, Zhan accepted a viewer challenge to read aloud trolling comments about her posted to an online forum. Scrolling through dozens of jokes at her expense, Zhan burst into tears before turning off the camera.

Her breakdown went viral almost immediately, drawing attention and support even beyond the Go world. Over the following months, more than 1 million new followers joined Zhan’s channel, catapulting her from the fringes of the Go scene to the center of the sport’s streaming-fueled boom.

Not all of her newfound fans are interested in board games, however. Instead, many see in Zhan’s persistence a kind of hope, with her breakdown and subsequent recovery making her an unlikely icon for a generation struggling with its own unmet expectations.

Now Zhan streams roughly every other day, sometimes about Go and sometimes about her life. Becoming an internet celebrity was never her goal, she says, but after a career filled with ups and downs, she’s willing to ride her luck as far as it will take her.

A ‘good seed’

Zhan Ying was born in Baoding, a historic city in northern China’s Hebei province, in 1995. Her full name, which means “fighting eagle,” was chosen by her father, an air force pilot. At the age of 6, her parents enrolled her in a local institution’s Go course, “to develop intelligence and resilience,” Zhan tells Sixth Tone.

Go was a popular extracurricular in early 2000s China, as a generation that grew up worshipping greats like Nie Weiping — who pushed China to victory in a series of high-profile matches against Japan in the 1980s — entered adulthood and began having kids of their own.

Invented in China more than 2,500 years ago, Go is played on a 19×19 grid, far larger than comparable games like chess. Two players — black versus white — must use their pieces to fence off empty spaces, capture the opponent’s stones, and eventually grab more territory than their opponent.

“Unlike chess, every piece on the Go board is equal,” Zhan explains. “It can be understood as a war of attrition and maneuver. No matter how many soldiers are captured, how many battles you have won or lost, you can only determine the result at the end of the game by counting each player’s territory.”

Zhan proved a quick study. After training for just two years, she was one of the most formidable players in her age bracket in Hebei. Her teacher encouraged her parents to consider training her as a professional. “She looks like a good seed,” Zhan recalls her teacher saying.

But pursuing a career as a professional Go player is not a decision to be taken lightly, especially for an 8-year-old. Most promising professional Go players quit school before the age of 10 to focus on the sport full-time. At the end of this lone journey is the dingduan sai, the annual professional qualification tournament, which at the time only promoted the top two female players each year. (The annual quota for new female professionals has since been increased to 10.)

Growing up, Zhan recalls that there was only one active professional Go player in Baoding, a city of more than 10 million people. This raised the stakes, as Zhan had to find teachers in other cities — first within Hebei, then later the nearby cities of Tianjin and Beijing.

“I was too young to realize what would happen,” Zhan says. “My parents just asked, ‘Do you hate playing Go?’ And I said no. That settled it.”

In 2007, at the age of 12, Zhan joined more than 100 other aspiring Go pros at a training center in the capital. Daochang — perhaps better known by their Japanese name, dojo — were historically places where people could go to immerse themselves in Buddhism and practice a spiritual way of life. Modern daochang, by comparison, are highly competitive and regimented training schools staffed by exacting coaches.

The stakes for coaches and students are high. Students’ performance in the yearly professional qualification tournament has a direct impact on a daochang’s reputation — and therefore its appeal to aspiring Go players and their families.

That means a daochang is incentivized to prioritize the needs of the students who are most likely to succeed. On a typical day, students spend their mornings and afternoons playing Go. A few of these games will be picked by the coaches for an evening review session, which is essential for improving students’ skills.

Zhan recalls that only four students a day would have their games analyzed. Other students could only audit or pay an extra fee for private tutoring. “It’s very expensive to study Go in Beijing,” she says.

It did not take long for Zhan to realize that, unlike in Baoding, she was not going to get special attention. More than a hundred students attended her daochang; all of them had at one point or another been deemed “good seeds” by their teachers. At home, Zhan enjoyed a reputation as a Go genius. In Beijing, however, that special status evaporated.

Zhan’s first professional qualification tournament took place just months after she arrived in the capital. Unsurprisingly, she failed. There were more than 80 female players competing for just two spots, and Zhan was neither the most experienced nor the most talented. Still, she left optimistic that she would make the leap before she turned 15.

She missed that goal. “I began to feel like a grown-up,” Zhan recalls. “When I was younger, I had no idea about the weight of this tournament. But gradually, I came to realize how important it is, what it meant to my life, and with what kind of reverence I should treat it. Winning it would change my life, while losing it meant getting stuck here and starting all over again the next year.”

A gendered game

The scarcity of promotion opportunities for female Go players is not a new problem. The quota reflected the relatively small population of female Go players prior to the 1990s. But the dim prospect of turning professional also deterred young women from taking up the sport, resulting in a vicious cycle.

It wasn’t until 2009, as China’s top Go coaches and association leaders grew increasingly worried they were falling behind in women’s Go, that the annual quota was expanded: first to three, then five, and finally to its current total of 10. (In the same time frame, the quota for male professionals has risen from 17 to 20.)

In 2013, China launched the Women’s League A, 14 years after the debut of the men’s league. The following July, a nearly 20-year-old Zhan made her eighth push for professional qualification. Surviving until the final round, she was among eight contestants with the same score vying for one of five promotion slots in a shoot-out. Despite losing badly to Lu Minquan, a 15-year-old rising star, Zhan scraped into fifth place based on her opponents’ winning percentage.

Just as losing a battle on the Go board does not mean losing the game, Zhan had captured just enough space to reach the pros.

After the tournament, Zhan took a weeklong vacation. Her first professional matches came as a pleasant surprise after the grueling routine of the daochang: Competitions were held at five-star hotels, managed by the national Go association, and attended by the country’s top players. Everything in the room, Zhan says, reminded her to “respect the game.”

The novelty wore off quickly, however. “It’s like graduating from a good university, only to then have to find a good job,” Zhan recalls. She still trained in the daochang, this time surrounded by even stronger players, including both professionals intent on achieving a higher dan, or ranking, as well as younger savants like Lu. Only the best would be selected for the national team — China’s top Go training center.

“It was a moment of truth: I had to climb another mountain. The only difference was that I was 20, not an 8-year-old child anymore.”

Zhan wasn’t put off by her losses, even as they stacked up, something she attributes to her parents. “They always told me that it’s normal, that I just need to learn from a setback and not make the same mistake again,” Zhan recalls. “I would always make the same mistake twice, but I’d correct it the third time.”

Still, losing games at the professional level comes at a higher cost: prize money, promotion opportunities, and even sponsorship deals can all dwindle. Even more frustrating was losing to younger players. When Zhan came to Beijing, she was the prodigy, the upstart looking to unseat the pros. But as she aged, she found herself with a target on her back.

Losing to players five or even 10 years her junior stung. “I had a difficult time reconciling with myself — perhaps for years until I decided to leave the pro scene,” Zhan says.

Breaking the rules

In recent decades, the field of professional Go has been dominated by younger players. A mentally and physically demanding game, Go matches can last for hours. In tournaments, it is not uncommon for players to compete on consecutive days. Top players usually claim their first championship title in their teenage years or early 20s, when they still have the stamina to stay focused during marathon sessions. Even for the best of the best, the championship window is narrow.

The sudden arrival of artificial intelligence further complicated Zhan’s chances. Go players long believed their game was, unlike chess, uncrackable by computers. It was too complicated, with too many potential outcomes. Then, in 2016, two years after Zhan turned pro, AlphaGo defeated the Korean great Lee Sedol in a series of matches in Seoul.

Within months, computer programs were everywhere on the Go scene, helping beginners and professionals alike analyze games and formulate strategy. While most news headlines focused on AlphaGo’s historic victory, AI algorithms soon overturned hundreds of years of received knowledge and strategy. Some dingshi, or standard sequences that have been taught for decades if not centuries, were found to be flawed, and AI pointed the way for new strategies for identifying the most valuable territory on the board.

Older players, trained in the traditional openings, felt obsolete. Lee, the Korean great, retired in 2019, saying he no longer enjoyed the game.

“Kids are lucky to learn Go today,” Zhan laments. “I belong to a generation that underwent traditional training methods. I can deliberately forget some of those ‘standard sequences,’ but unless I find a way to wipe my memory, I will inevitably be influenced by the shadows of the past. The new generation doesn’t need to unlearn the wrong beliefs. They are destined to progress faster than me.”

Despite these frustrating experiences, Zhan has fond memories of her time as a professional, and especially of the other female top players. After making the acquaintance of two top-ranked female players from Korea, Choi Jeong and Oh Yujin, Zhan in 2017 enrolled in a one-year Korean-language daochang training program in Seoul, a highly unusual choice for a female player from the Chinese mainland.

For the first time in her life, Zhan was on her own. On weekdays, she shuttled back and forth between daochang and seminars organized by professional players. And on weekends, she skipped practice, hopped on the bus, and explored the city. On the sidelines of international tournaments, she volunteered to translate for Chinese and Korean players and discussed the latest developments of professional Go in each country.

“(That year in Korea) had a profound impact on me,” Zhan says. “I made friends, learned to interact with people in a foreign country, learned how to live, how to enjoy life, and how to balance Go and leisure.”

After returning to China, Zhan set out to explore other career paths. Deep down she felt that she was not as crazy for the sport as the top Go players. “I can’t keep myself focused on Go 365 days a year,” she says. “I can force myself to do it, but players with whole-hearted enthusiasm will surely outperform me.”

She started commentating for a Go website and a grassroots league. After the COVID-19 pandemic hit, all games went online, and the league proposed paying her to commentate over its livestreams.

It was May 2020, and Zhan was just happy to have a steady job. Slowly, she began to make a name for herself as a streamer. By October 2022, her channel had more than 40,000 followers. That made her one of China’s most-watched Go commentators, but it still wasn’t enough to guarantee a sustainable income.

Meanwhile, her playing career was in freefall: Increasingly irrelevant on the professional Go circuit, her 2021-22 season ended in a disastrous 2-16 record.

Her worries and fears came to a sudden head during that fateful October livestream, she says. One comment in particular stood out: the commenter dismissed her livestreams as a natural fallback for someone who simply wasn’t good enough to earn money as a pro. It was as though all the disappointments she’d suffered during her career came rushing back at once. In tears, Zhan disconnected her camera.

Within a week, the video clip went viral well beyond the Go community. Zhan’s emotional response offered a rare humanizing glimpse of the pressure many Go professionals feel. By the time she began livestreaming again a few days after the incident, she found herself performing to an audience in the millions.

But if there’s one thing Zhan’s Go training had taught her, it was how to seize an opportunity. Taking advantage of her newfound fame, she quickly rented a studio and devoted herself to livestreaming full-time. She also branched out, creating wide-ranging content covering everything from breakdowns of recent matches and anecdotes about life on the professional Go circuit to sillier bits like wearing a Mona Lisa costume, performing dance challenges, or hosting cook-offs with top Go players.

“I’m not an educator,” Zhan says. “I’m simply telling the public: What is Go? Who are professional Go players? What kind of lives do they lead?”

“We’re not a group of cunning old men practicing the Tao in remote mountains and forests,” Zhan says, referring to a popular stereotype. “We’re young and we live downtown. And Go is an interesting sport.” She adds that her livestreaming has helped her to rediscover the pure pleasure of Go, in part because her livelihood no longer depends on the outcome of her matches.

For Zhan’s viewers, her appeal is not limited to Go. To many, hers is a story of coming to terms with one’s own ordinariness — a bitter lesson that has taken on new relevance in China in recent years. Jobseekers who repeatedly hit a wall find Zhan’s seven straight setbacks in the qualification tournament relatable. Her struggle to climb the professional hierarchy echoes the frustrations of young wage earners trapped in a rat race at work. And her ability to laugh off slightly offensive memes referring to her past misplays, such as her “2-16” record or her “Queen of the Qualification Tournament” title, resonates with her fans.

“I studied a niche but meaningful major, but even with a master’s degree, I had difficulty finding a job,” reads one representative fan comment. “It was during that time that I stumbled upon Zhan. The way she boldly declared there was nothing wrong with being 2-16 not only sparked joy, but also resonated with me. When I finally got a job, the first thing I did was send her a tip.”

Zhan seems to understand this aspect of her fandom. “I don’t consider myself a great Go player — I have no impressive achievements or brilliant moves to my name,” she says. “I have no championships, looks, or any background that would interest people. I’m just an ordinary person. I think people see themselves reflected in me.”

In Go, there is a technique known as the “turnaround,” which means opening a new space on the board when faced with a losing battle elsewhere, even if it requires the sacrifice of already placed stones. It’s hard not to see shades of that strategy in Zhan’s post-2022 career revival, as she travels across China to engage with university students, signs sponsorship deals, and promotes the Asian Games, which has included Go as an official discipline since 2010.

Whether it will prove a winning play remains to be seen. Zhan certainly hopes that her livestreaming gig will last longer than her Go career, but she also understands that nothing is guaranteed. “No one can tell me the answer because no one has walked this path before me,” she says. “I can only rely on myself.”

(Header image: Wang Zhenhao, edited by Ding Yining/Sixth Tone)