We stopped our partnership with Goro

Hi guys,

The following post will explain why we stopped our partnership with Goro, who used to be one of our teachers. 

TL;DR:

Goro provided us a fake photo for his teacher page while claiming it was real. As a result, we will no longer be working with him. 

The full story:

In late March, we announced a partnership between Goro Matsuo and the Open Study Room.

As we like to do for our teachers, we created a page on our website introducing Goro, his Go study and his teaching based on information he provided us. We always wait for the teachers to give their consent concerning the content before publishing this page.

When we asked him if he wanted a photo of him on this page, he provided us with a picture of him playing Go.

You can imagine our surprise when we recently came across this article from Ed Lee published in the American GO E-Journal in 2014. There, you can see the very same photo illustrating a Chinese former insei  named "Maojie Xia" visiting the Santa Barbara Go club in the United States.

We asked Goro about this, and he admitted to the fact that he is not the person depicted on the photo. He subsequently claimed that he didn't want a photo of him on the internet.

While this incident may seem very minor, it did break the mutual trust between him and the OSR team, which is much needed for the relationship between us and the OSR teachers. 

It is obviously our responsibility to double-check the facts that we publish on this website, and you can rest assured that we will be much more meticulous from now on.

Please be assured that all our other teachers  have rankings from official Go federations and are well known in the Go world for taking part in various real life Go events.

We will stick to that standard from now on, as we should have done in the first place.

Regards, 
The OSR team.