ROAD TO 1800: FIGHT WITH A SHOGI MASTER

Hello, my fellow OTB players, and welcome to the first edition of my Road to 1800 Blog series. I currently hold a FIDE rating of 1623 and hope to top 1800 by the end of the year.

This past weekend, April 2nd and 3rd, the Osaka Chess Championship was held, right here in Osaka, Japan. The tournament serves as a qualifier for the Japanese Championship, which will take place later this month in Tokyo. I entered the tourney knowing that my chances of qualification were slim, but with some luck I felt I had an outside chance...this proved to be a ridiculous belief...but more on that later.

The tournament had a special buzz this year with the addition of a Shogi Master. Here in Japan Chess comes far behind Shogi (Japanese Chess). For those of you unfamiliar with the game it is actually really similar to chess. In short, both games have pieces with certain abilities and attributes; the purpose is to capture your opponents pieces and taking the opponents King ends the game, there are even pieces that move like Knights, Bishops and Rooks.

Yet, there are differences, for instance, once you capture an opponent's piece, you can return that piece to the game as your own any time during the rest of the game, as a turn. Also, some of your pieces gain attributes by reaching a certain rank, imagine your pawns being able to attack in six directions once they get to the 6th rank.

Thus, a Master Shogi player would obviously have really strong calculation abilities. Enter Mitsunori Makino, who only recently started playing Chess and is already nearing 2000 level strength. Unfortunately for my qualification chances' I would end up playing this Beast...but more on that later.

First a couple puzzles featuring missed Tactics from yours truly.

A Hard tactic to find. Hint: the pin on the Knight allows you to attack.

This next one, is truly difficult; the Engine takes a few seconds to rate the strength of this move, it reads 0.00...then violently swings in Black's favor; which makes it even more amazing that my opponent was able to point out this possibility to me, after the game without an engine.

No Hints, just use the Force.

Now, the main event, my 4th round opponent didn't show, thus I had 3 wins, which meant I was paired with the Shogi Master on board 2.

And that was it, that was Fight with a Shogi Master, what did we learn...that's right don't pick fights with Shogi Masters. Congratulations to Jerwell Andoy for winning the tournament with a perfect score.

One more thing, about the qualification for the Japanese Championship; finishing in 10th place I was obviously out of contention...but a funny thing happened, some of the participants had already qualified, while others didn't want to bother with a week long trip to Tokyo...so guess who Qualified?

Thanks for reading and feel free to share this blog with your friends down at the Library or Bar. Let me know in the comment section what I should do in order to reach FIDE 1800.

Cheers, SheldonOfOsaka.