Hi Tony,
The Korean system defines Amateur as a player who was NOT in a school TT system. The amateur assn never lets school trained people play in City and Regional tourneys, only in a National tourney and only in the Pro Player division.
Schools select promising athletes in grade school, hire an ex-pro, give him a small budget, a general purpose room and several hours of time after classes... then that ex-pro smokes the living dogcrap outta the kids on fundamentals, one on one drill, and match play.
The decent HS kids are at 2500+... with the exceptional ones better than 2700. Oh Sang Uhn's son - Oh Joon Seoung is one of these and is prolly near 2800. A lot of those kids from Dae Gwang HS are pretty damn good.
Here is a vid of Yoon Hong Guhn playing vs Oh Joon Seoung.
Both Yoon Hong Guhn and Hwang Jae Seoung are rated National Open Div 1 class... you gotta be mid 2300s rated to crack into the low end of that class. Some of those cats are 2400+. When they get that good, some of them start getting classified as Div ZERO, so they gotta give a 2 pt handicap to Div Open players.
The Div 0 players might reach 2500s, but it is damn near impossible to get better than that if you were not trained professionally as a kid.
Nobody in the amateur system gets better than that.
Yoon HG is a very experienced crafty player, he plays at upper 2300s on a bad day and mid 2400s+ on his normal good days. Yoon HG has been around Korean amateur TT a very long time.
Here is a pic I took with him in 2012 back when we were both sponsored by Nexy Korea... he was sponsored for skill, I was sponsored only because I spoke Korean and opened my big mouth on the internet.
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