Michael Redmond

Michael Redmond is an American professional Go player born May 25, 1963, in Santa Barbara, California. He turned professional in 1981 under teacher Yusuke Oeda and in 2000 became the first Western Go professional to reach 9 dan, remaining the only Westerner to reach the game's highest grade in a discipline dominated by players from China, Japan and South Korea. He reached the runner-up round of the Shinjin-O and NEC Shun-Ei tournaments in the early 1990s, and later became known internationally as a commentator, voted Best Commentator for Japan's NHK channel in 2005 and providing English-language commentary for the 2016 DeepMind Challenge Match between Lee Sedol and AlphaGo.