China’s 22-year-old rising star beat both of Korea’s best on the way to his second world title — and kept a 30-year streak of history alive.
Professional Go has a handful of tournaments where the best players from Korea, China, Japan, and Taiwan all collide, and the LG Cup is one of the biggest of them. Hosted in Korea since 1996, it crowns something close to a world champion. And in its 31 editions, it has produced a strange piece of trivia: nobody — not one player — has ever won it twice in a row.
This June, Korea’s Shin Minjun came within a single game of finally breaking that curse. Instead, China’s Wang Xinghao made sure it lives on.
A final decided by the smallest margin in the game
The best-of-three final was played June 14–16 at a traditional hanok hotel in Jeonju, South Korea, and the first two games could hardly have been closer. In Go, when neither player resigns, the game is counted at the end — and the smallest possible winning margin is half a point, a buffer built into the scoring precisely so there are no ties. Both opening games came down to exactly that.
Game 1 was a six-hour marathon that went all 308 moves to counting, with Shin Minjun, the defending champion, squeaking out a half-point win. Game 2 flipped the script: Shin fell badly behind early — live AI evaluation at one point gave him a single-digit chance of winning — then mounted a furious comeback, only to run out of ammunition in a late ko fight and lose by, once again, half a point.
With the series tied, Game 3 was a different kind of fight. Shin, playing White, overreached in a central battle by trying to cut apart stones that could not quite be cut. Wang handled the attack with what Korean commentators described as watertight defense, took control, and never let go. Shin resigned after 183 moves, and Wang Xinghao was the LG Cup champion.
The jinx holds
To appreciate what Shin Minjun was chasing, consider who failed before him. Lee Changho — for many fans the greatest player who ever lived — won the LG Cup four times, but never twice in a row. Shin Jinseo, the current world No. 1, has won it three times: never consecutively. Across three decades, the trophy has simply refused to stay in the same hands.
Shin Minjun, 27 and ranked third in Korea, had earned his shot the hard way, knocking out Japan’s Shibano Toramaru and China’s Gu Zihao and Yang Kaiwen on his way to a second straight final. Both of his previous world titles came at this very event — the 25th LG Cup, where he beat China’s Ke Jie, and the 30th, where he defeated Japan’s Ichiriki Ryo just months ago. Winning back-to-back would have put him somewhere neither Lee Changho nor his own generation’s stars had ever gone. It wasn’t to be.
Remember the name: Wang Xinghao
If the jinx is the fun storyline, Wang Xinghao is the important one. The 9-dan, currently ranked fourth in China, didn’t sneak through a soft draw — in the semifinal he eliminated Shin Jinseo, the man who has dominated world Go for the past half-decade, and in the final he beat the defending champion after losing the opening game. Dropping Game 1 of a short final to a red-hot opponent, on their home soil, and calmly winning the next two is the kind of thing that separates future champions from talented hopefuls.
It’s his second major world title, following the inaugural Beihai Xinyi Cup in 2025, and it caps a bumpy stretch on the biggest stage: Wang had lost two other world finals along the way — to Shin Jinseo at the Nanyang Cup in early 2025, and to Korea’s Park Junghwan at the inaugural Shinhan Kiseon this February. Third time was the charm, and Korean media were quick to describe him as the player expected to carry the future of Chinese Go. Wang himself credited his preparation, saying an opening he had researched appeared on the board early in the decider and everything flowed from there — and admitted, with a champion’s honesty, that he felt he had played above his usual level all week.
The win also nudges the national ledger: China now has 13 LG Cup titles to Korea’s 15 — with Japan on 2 and Taiwan on 1 — and takes the trophy back to China for the first time in four years.
For Korea, the tournament is a warning shot. Its two best players, Shin Jinseo and Shin Minjun, were both in the semifinals of a home event, and both were beaten by the same 22-year-old. The world No. 1 spot isn’t changing hands just yet — but for the first time in a while, someone is genuinely knocking on the door.
