From: Pieter Stouten <STOUTEN <at> EMBL <dot> BITNET>
Date: 10 jul 1990
Subject: Re:  The bizarre 1982 Meijin title match.

With respect to the bizarre 1982 Meijin title match, Chris Sterritt mentions
the following:
 
>thanks for the interesting discussion of the (recent?)
>title match.
 
I know it is not recent !! The games of the 1990 Meijin title match (which
just finished) are currently being scrutinized. After clearance, they will be
put into the archive !
 
>I found the list of games and results fascinating,
>in particular that:
>
>>The final result being: Kato 4 - Nakahara 3 -  Jishogi 1. Another
>>curious aspect of this match was that black did not lose a single game.
>
>Is this really unusual?  How so?  I believe that in western chess, white
>wins something like 51% of games, a very slight advantage to going first.
>(Anyone care to correct this statistic?)  What is the figure for Shogi?
 
I have no recent statistics about Shogi (yes, shame on me for not keeping up
with Shogi literature, but I did not really have access to the hottest
Shogi news items for quite some time). What I know is that until a few
years ago in professional games the percentage of draws was only 1, 2 at
the most (how much is that in chess ?) and that black and white won roughly
the same number of games. Nowadays, there seems to be a sligh tendency for
black to win more, but it is hard to say, whether this is a statistical
fluctuation or not. Maybe one of our Japanes subscribers or Reijer
Grimbergen can provide more information. Please do so, if you can.
 
Cheers,
            Pieter.